It took decades for Josiah Wise to find his voice. This is figuratively true for most developing adults, but for Wise, who performs music under the name serpentwithfeet, it was also literal. The distinct, shivering vibrato he sings with—so strong it sounds like his larynx is seizing almost every time he opens his mouth—was always there, even back when he joined the choir of his family’s Pentecostal church at age 6. But when he began formal training at age 11, in his mostly white, boy choir, his teacher urged him to sing in what’s called pure tone, effectively stifling his vibrato.
“It’s almost like for a black person cutting off our legs,” he recalled to me last week at Gotan, a coffee spot in Midtown Manhattan. He said he struggled with it while studying music at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia—to vibrate or not vibrate, that was the question.
“My voice was in a weird spot for years,” he recalled. “Once I graduated, I said, ‘I’m just going to let my voice be free.’”
He unleashed that voice to the world with his five-song 2016 EP, blisters. On June 8, his proper full-length debut, soil, arrives. It’s a breathtaking album, baroque and gritty, melodramatic and blunt. Some songs are specific to the point of being groundbreaking (in “waft,” a lurching ode to man funk, he sings of his stinky object of desire, “He knows love can’t exist where there is cologne”), and some are blindsiding in their tenderness. In “mourning song,” Wise makes a pageant of his grief, singing, “It’s a gift to miss you/What kind of lover would I be if I didn’t properly grieve?” The first single (and closing track) of soil isn’t lovelorn, but it’s similarly vulnerable; “bless ur heart,” in fact, is an indication of how utterly lacking in cynicism Wise’s music is—he means the titular blessing straightforwardly, not condescendingly, as it’s so often wielded in popular usage. It is a naked ode, not a tee-hee bless-his-heart eye roll. Bless your heart: he really means it.
It’s rare to hear someone sound so fully formed on a debut album. During our hour-long conversation, I found Wise, 29, to be very clear about who he is. He doesn’t have the allergies to labels that some queer people in the public eye and/or avant-soul singers exhibit. “I’m not fluid. I’m gay. I like men. I needed that to be clear,” he said, regarding the gender-specificity on his album, where odes are fueled by words like “him,” “boy,” “man.”“I could have made it [less] open, but that’s violent to me,” he said.
And when I asked if he thought his gothic, often stark sound qualified as R&B, he told me, “Absolutely.” “That’s what I grew up listening to, gospel and R&B,” he said. “I learned classical music, but it was an outfit. I had to drink my tea before I went in. That wasn’t something I could walk into naked. Gospel and R&B, that’s my birthright.”
“I’m always talking to and about black people and my black experience,” he continued. “I would never shade R&B. R&B’s expansive. When I think R&B and hip hop, I think about Flying Lotus and Thundercat, and Stevie Wonder and Erykah Badu.”
Missy Elliott was big for Wise, too. And so was Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Lawrence Brownlee, Juan Diego Flórez, and Cecilia Bartoli. In conversations, he has a tendency to rattle off names of the people who have inspired him—when discussing lyric writing, he strings together Gwendolyn Brooks, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin—as though he’s a walking tribute to those who have paved his way.
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