Boa

On Friday, I saw Boa at Thalia Hall by myself. As I found my place in the crowd, deja vu struck. Just shy of a year prior, I was at the same venue for my first ever solo show, Blonde Redhead with Lutalo. Blonde Redhead’s sound filled the venue with a reverberance that could be felt rippling through the floorboards.  The lights, the fog, the instrumentals blaring through the crisp, clear resonance of Kazu Makino’s vocals- it was all magic. But it was Lutalo that stole the show for me.

That night, I was on a mission to the front. I arrived early to stand alone at the barricade, but quickly decided a silent friendship with the stranger, ten people over, who danced like no one was watching the whole night through. When Lutalo’s recitation of ‘For Now” began, my eyes swelled. It was one of those moments, like I could be sure I knew exactly what he was saying because, I could feel it. If you were to ask, maybe I couldn’t describe it with the same affordances he would, but if you were to crawl under my skin, under the layers of purples, and reds, and blues, stretched thin between my muscles and my soul, you would find the hum of the stereo and the pen and the paper with which he wrote.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have that moment at least once at every good show; the moment when you feel it. Whatever it is, wherever it is, it’s like you can taste it.

During Boa’s “Drinking”, I could do exactly that- taste it. The flavor of begging on my lips, the bitterness of pleading, the sour of tarte yearnings for change.

“You say the drinking
Is better than a woman
And you say the thinking
Takes too much time
Well, God save your children
Should you have them
For to you, there's nothing
If there's no wine

You have so much more”

As I stood in the center of the crowd, from all directions, Jasmine Rodgers, of Boa, was singing directly to me, about exactly what I was thinking. I could feel it.

Rodgers’ vocals throughout the night paralleled those of Makino’s perfectly. Crisp, delicate, penetrating, intricate, purposeful. Each note, every syllable had a goal, and a dream, and a life of its own.

On that night, I was not alone.