In true Knowles sister fashion, Solange revealed only a handful of clues about her new album, When I Get Home, ahead of its arrival last night. There was the T Magazine profile last October, in which the polymath artist gave her first short statement of intent behind the record. She said of the songs, “There is a lot of jazz at the core. But with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle.” More cryptically, she mentioned that the process of putting together her 2017 outdoor performance piece “Scales” caused a shift in perspective: “I realize how much wider, figuratively and literally, my work could be if I took myself away as subject.”
Earlier this week, when Solange launched her customized BlackPlanet page, fans started to use her visual cues to decode what the A Seat at the Table follow-up might possibly sound like. In various images, Solange is seen wearing chrome cowboy boots (a strong case for the ongoing “black yeehaw agenda”), shown naked in a 3D digital render, and draped in sci-fi clear plastic. The visual world that she presented was equally thrilling and perplexing; it was a portrayal of Texas as a black “Westworld,” processed through a hazy VSCO filter.
But all the pieces of the puzzle clicked together when Solange released When I Get Home, a record equally indebted to cosmic jazz as it is to Houston’s signature druggy chopped ‘n’ screwed style. Over the course of 19 fluid tracks, Solange orchestrates a small army of collaborators, samples a few iconic (and hilarious!) black women, and shows love to her hometown. Here’s what you need to know going in.
Ode to Southern Rap
Ahead of the album, Solange shouted out two Houston rap heroes via her Instagram: Devin the Dude and Mike Jones. While the latter rapper doesn’t appear on When I Get Home, the former shows up on “Dreams” (a track that also features production by Earl Sweatshirt and Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, as well as bass by Raphael Saadiq). It’s a full circle moment for Solo, who has covered Devin’s 2002 song “Doobie Ashtray”. Elsewhere, Geto Boys’ Scarface contributes his earth-rumbling vocals on the Standing on the Corner–produced “Not Screwed! (interlude).”
Houston is not the only rich regional hip-hop scene that gets love throughout the record. Considering Atlanta’s stronghold on mainstream rap, it’s no surprise that Solange recruits the city’s longstanding titan Gucci Mane for the sluggish duet “My Skin My Logo.” Playboi Carti also makes a stand-out appearance on “Almeda,” his squeaky, oddball delivery punctuating the Solange/Pharrell production. Another unexpected vocal contributor on “Almeda” is trap production wizard Metro Boomin, who is also credited as co-producer on the bop “Stay Flo.”
Constellation of Collaborators
Aside from all the above-mentioned contributors, there are so many more that have added their touch to When I Get Home—even if their presences are not immediately obvious. The New York group Standing on the Corner scores several production credits, as does the cutting-edge French composer Chassol. Animal Collective’s Panda Bear also appears frequently throughout, co-producing the reggae-tinged “Binz” and contributing vocals to “Time (is),” “Beltway,” and “I’m a Witness.” Odd Future alums Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt show up as co-producers on different songs—not a surprise considering that both of them are known homies with Solange.
Other vocal features include Cassie on “Way to the Show”; Sampha on “Time (is)”; Steve Lacy and Abra on “Sound of Rain”; The-Dream on “Binz”; and—last but not least—Solange’s son Julez on “Nothing Without Intention (Interlude).” Even when the When I Get Home tracklist is stacked, the individual voices aren’t always awarded the spotlight. Often times, the features sound like they’re intended to blend in with the track—meaning that the artists here might have internalized Solange’s new philosophy of taking yourself “away as subject” and checked their egos at the door.
New Ways to Sequence an Album
Back in September, Earl Sweatshirt hosted an episode of his Red Bull Radio show “Earl Sweatshirt Stays Inside,” and Solange was a special guest. Together, the two chatted about their mutual love for Tierra Whack before Earl invited Standing on the Corner’s Shamel Cee Mystery (aka Gio Escobar) to the program. The episode actually predicted a lot about how both Solange’s When I Get Home and Earl Sweatshirt’s latest album, Some Rap Songs, would sound. The two records are somehow both off-kilter and fluid, as samples punch in and out and songs flow into one another. This free-form, continuous production style could definitely be inspired by Standing on the Corner’s 2017 sample-heavy Red Burns project, which consists of two sprawling tracks that are both about 30 minutes long. Tierra Whack’s 2018 album Whack World, in which every song cuts off at the one-minute mark, also seems like a prototype for WIGH, whose brief interludes abruptly cut off.
Black Women Narrators
Like Master P and Solange’s parents serving as the narrators of A Seat at the Table, the voices of an eclectic range of iconic black women are weaved throughout When I Get Home. In a pointed decision to honor Houston’s Third Ward, the neighborhood she grew up in, Solange samples Phylicia Rashad reciting a poem called “On Status” written by Rashad’s mother Vivian Ayers-Allen in the 1987 TV movie “Superstars & Their Moms.” The track title—“S McGregor (interlude)”—refers to a Houston road. Solange also selects another Third Ward native, the late queer poet Pat Parker, to honor on “Exit Scott (interlude)”; Parker’s gorgeous love poem “Sunshine” opens the track.
But Solange also has a sense of humor about her references. For “Can I Hold the Mic (interlude),” she samples the bickering of Diamond and Princess from Crime Mob, the Atlanta hip-hop group behind the crowd-rousing anthem “Knuck If You Buck.” On “We Deal With the Freak’n (intermission)” and “Binz,” Solo inserts the words of Atlanta sex guru Alexyss K. Tylor, whose claim to fame is her hilarious and outrageous public access TV show “Vagina Power,” which ran briefly from 2006 to 2007. Finally, “Nothing Without Intention (interlude)” centers around a sample of a YouTube video called “Florida Water For Cleansing and Clearing,” in which the beauty vlogger Goddess Lula Belle breaks down exactly what Florida Water is. (Solo brought a bottle of the spiritual liquid to last year’s Met Gala.)
Transcendent Solange-isms
- “We were falling in the deep/Bathing in the light/We were rollin’ up the street/Chasing the divine” (“Down With the Clique”)
- “I can't be a singular expression of myself, there's too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers, so many” (“Can I Hold the Mic (Interlude)”)
- “Brown liquor/Brown sugar, brown face/Black skin/Black Benz, black plays/Black molasses, blackberry the masses” (“Almeda”)
- “Gucci on his sheets, Gucci on his feet/I didn’t wanna sock her, she had Gucci on her cleats” (“My Skin My Logo”)
- “Dollars never show up on CP time/I just wanna wake up on CP time” (“Binz”)
- “You can work through me/You can say what you need in my mind/I'll be your vessel/I'll do it every time” (“I’m a Witness”)
