Own the room
Seeing and hearing live music is one of my favorite pastimes, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between writing and music as art forms. One show in particular—Amythyst Kiah and Yola at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in February 2020 (my last live show before the pandemic shut everything down)—was a lesson for me about what it means to be a visible, creative person in the world.
Let me start by setting the stage for you. The Great American Music Hall is a small jewel box of a venue, and it was full of a loud Friday-night crowd, most of whom were there to see the headliner, Yola. I was in the back of the room in the bar line when Kiah, the opening act, came out on stage. She was greeted with polite applause, but the buzz of conversation around the room didn’t quiet. Until she opened her mouth and began singing and, one by one, the conversations came to a halt, even at the back bar.
Being the opener can be a tough gig, and I’ve seen plenty of musicians who are tentative or even resentful of the position. You’re facing a crowd, after all, who is likely there to see someone else, who may never have heard of you, and may not give a shit about your music. They may be more interested in flirting or gossiping or drinking than they are in hearing songs you’ve poured your heart and soul into.
And how did Kiah handle this tricky situation? She opened with a classic Son House song, “Grinnin’ in Your Face,” about how people are assholes who will talk about you behind your back or in front of your face, and you just can’t give a fuck. (This week’s post comes with a playlist, if you want to listen along.) It was a brilliant opening gambit that she carried off with her strong voice and supreme confidence.
By the end of her second song, she had the crowd with her, enough so that they were listening when she talked about what it was like to be a “black woman with a banjo” and then sang “Darlin Corey,” a song about a moonshiner who has a “forty-four wrapped around her body and a banjo on her knee,” following that up with “Polly Ann’s Hammer,” a song about John Henry’s wife. By the end of her set, which also featured a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and the anthemic “Black Myself,” she owned that crowd.
I was still mulling over how she had pulled it off a few minutes later when Yola came out on the stage, in a dress blazing with sequins and an Afro that extended past her shoulders. This is a woman who takes up space, y’all. And she’s got a voice to match. Yola, too, talked and sang about vulnerability, loss, lack—about being homeless, about not being seen, about being deeply lonely. Here was a woman who could not have been more visible, standing on a stage, in a spotlight, belting out songs about invisibility.
It occurred to me that this is what all creative people do: they take the invisible and make it visible. And to do that, they have to make themselves visible, which can be scary AF.
Novelists, especially, are often shy of the spotlight. And that’s fine—privacy is part of what makes the experience of reading a novel special. A good novel provides a magical space that is apart from our daily lives. If we feel invisible in our own lives or are wrestling with pain or disappointment, novels provide a safe place for us to either escape or confront these problems.
But because novels are defined by this privacy, novelists themselves don’t get to witness readers enjoying their books, except in very oblique ways. Yola gets to look out over a crowd and see them lose their goddamned minds when she does a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “You’re All I Need to Get By.” What I want you to do for yourself this week is conjure up an imaginary scenario that captures this same feeling.
Imagine a room full of silent readers, all reading your novel, all of them silently celebrating when they get to your favorite metaphor, your very best plot twist, your heart-stopping climax. It could be a grand and serious room, like the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, or something intimate and cozy—maybe a fire-warmed yurt in a snowy wood, full of soft blankets and a bottomless urn of tea. Picture your readers there, turning the pages of your novel. Every now and then one of them will lift their head and look at you with reverence and joy, and you will nod and mouth the words, I know!
Reach for this vision on the days when the words won’t come. Remind yourself of why you are doing this hard thing. Your voice has the power to make the invisible visible. It’s a superpower, and you own it.
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