whoswyLee: the question bound to become a declaration
wyLee is a well of emotions, able to translate the memories of relationships that hurt/ changed/ expanded her into melodies and layered lyrics.
image courtesy of wyLee
whoswyLee aka wyLee, once briefly known as bay b. bop ft. wyLee (which raised a question from which her current moniker originates), aka Vanessa Chadehumbe is a South-African + Zimbabwean, New York based artist whose voice is warm and full, cool and velvety, effortless and so full of feeling.
The singer, songwriter and producer is creating songs about the woman most, if not all, of us would like to be: she knows how to say her piece, and she does, but she won’t hesitate to walk away from what no longer serves her. They aren’t quite stories of rebuilding oneself from the rubble of heartbreak—they sound like notes from a woman who knows when to step away before the demolition begins.
And yet, they’re also not.
A song I thought was a love song is actually a diss track. Another I believed was a tune to strut to is actually a song she wrote in the midst of heartbreak.
Unifying her vulnerability with strength and confidence instead of seeing them as irreconcilable sides of herself, learning to “access power from a place of vulnerability,” is what grounds her work. wyLee is a well of emotions, able to translate the memories of relationships that hurt/ changed/ expanded her into melodies and layered lyrics. She’s not singing about unrequited love or a relationship that has run its course too soon. She’s singing to how it actually feels to experience these moments, transforming her aches into songs as nuanced and contradictory as the feelings themselves often are.
image courtesy of wyLee
Emotional acuity allows her to convert her feelings into music, and then subvert the ways we’ve traditionally heard these songs. “The way people aren’t not given much room to explore themselves, to explore their feelings, or don’t want to touch that pain, haven’t been given the tools to touch that pain, or that joy, or whatever, because they’re so busy just trying to live, to survive. Art becomes that moment of pause for everybody” she emphasized, “to consider their feelings and engage with them.”
And in the same way that it’s difficult to define the meaning of her lyrics, wyLee’s sound cannot be confined to a single genre—though she immediately pointed out that her music isn’t deliberately genre-bending either—rather, they are singular yet cohesive reflections of who she is and what her experiences sound like to her, saying “whatever these lyrics demand of me is how I write.”
Before whoswyLee began producing her own music with software she had a very different approach. “Until sophomore year, the way I wrote songs, including the way I wrote ‘Rolling,’ was at the piano. Everything started at the piano, and for that reason everything kind of sounded a little showtuney. I knew this isn’t what I wanted it to sound like… all I knew about what I wanted it to sound like was that I wanted it to sound like my favorite song, I wanted to make my favorite song.” A self-taught pianist, who received a keyboard when she was 10 or so from her parents, she learned by spending hours teaching herself chords and learning to play “Halo” by Beyoncé and OneRepublic’s “Secrets.” She later said, laughing “there was a time I used Tinder exclusively like LinkedIn, I would swipe on there just looking for people who were musical” as a way to find free beats.
wyLee’s sound has long reflected the women who inspire her: Nina Simone, Beyoncé and her mother. As well as the staples of her adolescence: the whole Young Money group, the Gossip Girl soundtrack and also by her upbringing as a member of her church’s choir, where she eventually became the teen choir lead. Once she stepped into that role with the choir she began to come into her own with arrangements—building upon her time as a choir member—she developed her ability to layer sounds, which is heard in her music now. Now, better able to make the beats in her head come to life the sounds of her feelings into a beat, she said, “for one thing all my songs have tons and tons of layers. I tend to stack, stack, stack, stack vocals. My favorite thing to do is to just hop in there, start free-styling melodies and then put another layer on top, completely free-style it… It’s really an exercise of listening to what’s already happening and just following in the motion and finding out where we land.” She continued, “I’m a big believer in falling back and listening to what the music is telling you to do.”
image courtesy of wyLee
Growing up her experience with music was mostly in a church setting and American media. It wasn’t until she came to New York City for college, and gained a new understanding of what it means to immerse yourself in the place you live, that she began listening to South-African music and also revised her thesis on pop music— realizing the genre offers a lot more musical flexibility than its typically credited for. This was the beginning of when she began looking at music in a new light, “it [became] a place to connect with my Africanness as opposed to just being something I experience in entertainment places.” It was then, halfway through her first year, that she began to explore music more seriously and each step naturally led into the next.
She was gifted a lyric book and began writing music seriously for a friend shortly after. Eventually there were songs that didn’t quite match up with her friend’s sound but were songs she wanted, needed to hear, and so she began to sing them herself. Then her songs changed. She used to “play characters and write very vicariously” when she was writing for others. When she began writing for herself she was able to achieve a new degree of honesty and depth in her lyrics. By her junior year she had formed a group with friends called Thou Shalt Not Entertainment. Each moment has been a part of what she kept referring to as her “journey,” implying there’s no real beginning or end point in her becoming the artist she is today and hopes to be in the future.
This journey has not been linear and Dreamgirl, her newest single, reflects this.
This song is two years in the making. It’s what came from falling in love with a close friend and those feelings being unreciprocated. Immediately following the conversation where this was all revealed she opened up Logic to begin her process of translating her experience into music and “Dreamgirl,” like other songs she’s made, started to write itself.
The bassline led to the melodies and then the lyrics formed, in what she described as a “therapy session unto myself” saying, “it felt good to put everything down but then listen back to it and feel like getting up and dancing instead of wallowing.” Inspired by Rico Nasty’s production at the time, particularly on Ice Cream, she made the demo in one day. The beat, which was the first she’d made entirely on her own, and all the lyrics we hear today come from this demo. And while she immediately sent it out to friends (as she typically does when working on songs), she put it aside for awhile. At some point during her senior year she returned to it with a friend and they began mixing and polishing all the different parts, which is when she began talking about making a music video. By April 2019 footage had been filmed and it seemed like the project would soon come to a close.
But then another friend of hers suggested they take a different route with the song, explore its potential a bit more. Soon there were guitars and a somber sound, more singing instead of the rapping you hear on the upbeat song now. It stayed that way for a while until a conversation with her boyfriend at the time made her realize she was still thinking about the original version. By March of this year the song was officially ready.
She sent the song to streaming services in early May and anticipated a June release. However, in the midst of serious conversations surrounding race and protests for Black Lives Matter happening at the time, May and June was an emotional time for her and didn’t feel like the appropriate time to celebrate this moment of musical and personal achievement. Now, a year and three months after the song was finished and the music video filmed we are finally able to celebrate the creativity and talent of an artist who is proud of who she is, proud to be a Black woman, and taking steps to become the musician she hopes to be.
Reflecting on the transition from being a singer in a group, both the church choir and Thou Shalt Not Entertainment, to her debut as a solo artist with “Dreamgirl” she said, “Honestly, it doesn’t feel too different because my style is just naturally very collaborative.” Pausing briefly to confirm just how many people are involved and how many group chats there are for this project, the largest one charmingly called “Dream Team,” she continued, “[that] chat has fourteen people, there’s another chat with five people, another chat with three people.” She spoke multiple times about this moment, the culmination of a lot of time and effort, as an opportunity not just for herself but everyone involved, “there are just a lot, a lot, a lot of people and passions and talent involved. And it’s beautiful to me because I really could not take this all the way by myself and in that sense, and I guess similar to a choir, the creative output becomes everybody’s baby…. I wouldn’t know for a day in my life what it means to be truly solo, I’m consistently surrounded and I’m so grateful for that.”
image courtesy of wyLee
Even the cover art is an extension of the feelings wyLee is trying to capture with “Dreamgirl.” The base image is a photograph from last March taken by a good friend of hers, which she used to promote a GoFundMe she organized to get funds for the music video. When describing her vision to a mutual friend of someone in the “Dream Team” brought on to make the cover art, the words she used are what you see: dreamy, bubblegum, Black Powerpuff Girls, cartoons. But even more than that, the story behind the cover art sheds light on the way she approaches her work. Evidenced by the way she frequently mentioned the friends she’s been working with—who have contributed their producing, sound mixing, make-up and costuming, set designing, music video making skills to the project—she spoke to what is perhaps most compelling about this entire project right now, “this whole ‘Dreamgirl’ rollout has been a very legitimizing process for a lot of us.”
And collaboration isn’t confined to the work she and her team are doing. She deliberately invite all her listeners to take in the music and experience it for themselves, “when you are singing along with the song, connecting with the music, you are involved with the creative process. listening to music is an extension of the creative process,” saying “[listeners] fulfill the process, they complete the circle.”
When I asked her about the challenges of making music she said with reference to “Dreamgirl“ specifically, which she wrote in summer of 2018, “my voice has grown and changed a lot since then, there are things I can do now that I couldn't do then. Sometimes there’s that voice in the back of my head saying ‘okay, but next month what if you can do this, this, that, and this don’t you want to wait out and try that?” Generally speaking, she now finds herself dealing with new considerations when writing songs, “because I’m now very good at accessing my feelings musically. I'm trying to be conscious of other people’s feelings, and what their experience will be like listening to a song that might be about them. But I'm still trying to figure out how to balance that with also telling my truth. And telling my truth unapologetically.”
As of right now she says a collected body of work, an EP or album, isn’t something she’s considering in the near future but that knowing herself this could change— whether it’ll be because of her mutable moon sign or a rush of creativity remains to be seen.
But when thinking about the future, she said with exuberance, “the thing I’m most looking forward to creatively is when I have the resources for a full band, I’m envisioning a full band of Black women and a choir and everything and just to reimagine the songs I already have…I think about that all the time.” And beyond the dreams she has for live performances, her work is grounded in a long-term mission to make thoughtful and thought-provoking work. When thinking about the kind of creative she hopes to be she reflected on the role of music in her own life saying, “it has educated me, it has stirred up feelings in me, it has awakened consciousness in me and so I’m still figuring out what my work is” continuing on to explain the reason why she draws such deep inspiration from artists like Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, and Miriam Makeba is because “the power of their advocacy, their voice is felt in their artwork not separate from.”
image courtesy of wyLee
There were moments during our conversation when I became aware that I was witnessing the formation of whoswyLee in real time. Her journey now includes laying the foundation for her identity as a musician, which will continue to be built upon as she comes into repute and interviews happen more frequently. Was it interesting to have our morning meeting turn into an afternoon one on her account? Given how professionally she’s been approaching this release, including a brief correspondence I had with one of her friends who has already been tasked with managing her publicity, it was. There were a few times during the interview, when the conversation skewed from talking about her music directly and would lose steam, that I became aware of the ways in which we were putting on for one another—after all this is the first project for which she has done official press and my first official profile.
I wondered how wyLee differs from Vanessa, who was on my radar by our senior year at neighboring schools but whom I never met, and how these versions of herself are similar and different from Michaela (her middle name), which is how she’s known back home. In reviewing the recording of our conversation and writing this I found myself wondering a few times about how long she’d thought about the words she’d use to convey certain aspects of her process and her music—so precise and profound her answers often were. However, relatively early on into the conversation I guessed one of her zodiac signs. Soon after she shared the second of the primary three signs in a birth chart. By the halfway point into our hour and a half Zoom video chat I'd guessed the third. Regardless of your personal views on astrology, whether you think it’s fake or take issue with the determinations the Babyolonian belief system offers, wouldn’t you agree it’s rather curious?
Lest you assume it’s because I’m an astrologist with preternatural abilities, I'm not. Through a combination of mild research and astrology memes I am familiar enough with the signs to know the characteristic traits of each, and observant enough to recognize them in people. But very rarely do I get more than one right with someone I've just met. So at one point when she said she was trying to reframe the idea of “wearing [her] heart on [her] sleeve” as a “bad thing” into something from which she can derive “strength,” it became rather clear to me that maybe she really does wear her heart on her sleeve. That from our first meeting I felt I understood some aspects of who she is speaks to a tremendous amount of courage on her part. To be genuinely and confidently herself when many people, particularly during early adulthood (when the self is still in the crux of being developed, understood and accepted), tend to be the most vague version of themselves when meeting someone new, is striking. At that point I realized whoswyLee is not separate from the entirety of who she is and it’s felt in her music. Perhaps it’s what ultimately gives her songs their force.
The moment I listened to “Dreamgirl” I immediately went on SoundCloud to listen to her other songs. Many of which I listened to multiple times. I was struck then by the belief that she’ll really make it. And our conversation, wherein her certainty about who she is as an artist and what she’s making didn’t once approach arrogance, only furthered this belief. I’m not an industry savant, but I am of the conviction that being talented and determined is a powerful combination because at the age we both are now potential feels like it actually might mean something.
We spoke shortly after wyLee officially debuted the single for “Dreamgirl” and just days before the music video’s official release today. At one point while we were speaking she said “it just feels right, everything feels right, and over the past few months I’ve seen things fall in place in a way they just couldn’t have if I’d actually ended up releasing it a year ago.” The patience and dedication to cultivating her craft wyLee has demonstrated since she began taking music, her music, seriously is one that will carry her forward. This moment reflects where she’s been and where she’s going.
Click here to attend the release of the Dreamgirl music video release party tonight, July 10, 2020, at 10:00 P.M. EST.