An album like a chimera: “When I Get Home” by Solange

Solange
“When I Get Home”
(Saint Records / Columbia)

One of the contradictions that connects me to this album is that I love talking about it, but at the same time, it’s not that easy to do so.

There is so much to say, so many thoughts, feelings, and impressions. And yet I often think that there are no words for many things. Not the right ones, at least. Not the ones that adequately describe how much I love this record. In a way, my profession reaches its limits with this record. But perhaps this admission is an important step toward understanding. I have to surrender. I have to sit there in awe, even after what feels like a thousand listens. In the face of this world that Solange has created on “When I Get Home.” Even though I know every nook and cranny of this world and can even recite the interludes, the album has never lost its magic. It’s like an inner sparkle. Like a mysterious force that lifts everything off the ground. I call it: the art of floating.

As you can tell from the last few sentences, I never completely gave up, of course. And even for this text—or rather love letter—I’m still trying with words.

“When I Get Home” is an album of wondrous beauty. Nineteen calm, artfully gliding tracks between soul, R&B, jazz, and hip-hop, repeatedly interrupted by short interludes and filled with images and imaginings of Black America, full of moods, personal thoughts, and Afrofuturistic ideas. Experimental sketches flow together into a great stream of consciousness sound. All of this is far removed from traditional song structures and spectacularly liberated from the idea that pop music must be quickly graspable in the age of Spotify and YouTube. “When I Get Home” is the opposite: a world that can only be penetrated slowly when listening, but all the more deeply for that.

“When I Get Home” is a record like a chimera, a hybrid creature like the sphinx, at first glance a pop album, at second glance multimedia conceptual art. This becomes particularly clear when the music is superimposed on the (highly recommended) 30-minute short film that Solange made to accompany the album. The surreal imagery opens up a whole world of possible interpretations.
This is all the more impressive given that many had expected something different after “A Seat at the Table.”

In 2016, in the fall of Trump’s first shocking election, this album struck a chord like no other with its mix of black identity, vulnerability, and resilience. It was a glimmer of hope in a world shaken by racism and right-wing populism. I, too, had hoped for more anthems of resistance from Solange—perhaps even political answers.

With “When I Get Home,” Solange put the brakes on those expectations. It is a turn toward the sketchy and imaginative. It is still about the question of what constitutes black identity, how it expresses itself and sets itself apart, but it is no longer about that. However, the answers are no longer reflected in what is said and sung about it, but in moods, musical details, and freely associated images of her hometown of Houston, Texas, as a formative sphere of Black culture. In this Houston, the liquor is as dark as the skin color of neighbors and family members. The streets lie in dim light, and the past and future flow together like the warm Moog synthesizers with Afrofuturistic jazz and Screwed & Chopped.

In a way, “When I Get Home” is a statement against statements. And for art. For enduring complex levels of meaning. For ambiguities. And for the search for beauty. In everyday life, in dark times, in communities, and within oneself. Always.