The Room Being America
by Brian Howe
“It wants to go somewhere,” Gerald Moshell told NPR, back in 2017. “It wants to settle either here, or [there]. You don't know where it'll go, but it can't stop where it is.”
Moshell was talking about the tritone—the “devil’s interval,” which takes on a double meaning when Keenan Jenkins deploys it in “Right On.” The spaces between those notes, regular and terrible and inexorable, are like the spaces between deaths of Black men at the hands of the state—regular and terrible and inexorable. Moshell was talking about musicology, but he was describing the state of the nation, as well.
Keenan wrote the song in 2016, after the police murder of Philando Castile. It took him four years to record and release it—which he did on May 20, five days before the police murdered George Floyd. But there’s no such thing as prescience when a terrible topic is evergreen—the devil’s interval, indeed.
I premiered the new single in my paper on the 20th and haven’t stopped listening to it—or to Keenan’s prior EP as XOXOK, which is called Worthy—since then. When I asked Keenan if we could feature him here, he made an exquisite playlist to go with the song—one that instantly clarified my own connection with his music. (He loves all the same stuff I do. I screamed when I saw Rhye’s “Open,” one of my all-time faves.)
It’s the origin story of a 29-year-old Carrboro, North Carolina artist whose breakthrough feels imminent and inevitable:
Moistworks: How did you wind up at UNC?
Keenan Jenkins: I was born and raised in Rocky Mount When I was 15, I went to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham for high school. Then I got to UNC, and never left Chapel Hill and Carrboro after that. I studied social psychology. I realized very early in graduate school that I did not love doing psychology research. I decided to get the degree as quickly as I could so that I could move into doing music, which is what I was in love with.
I've always loved music. I remember being toddler in the car and belting along to Whitney Houston with my mom’s cassette tapes and crying when they got pulled out of the tape deck. I started playing clarinet in the middle school band. When I went to Science and Math, my roommate had a guitar, and I would just pick up his guitar all the time and play around with it. I have not put the guitar down since I was 15.
That’s when you started singing?
I guess. I definitely wasn't a good singer in high school. But I did it anyway.
But you’re such a good singer now.
I’m definitely not a naturally talented singer. I have to work hard at it. I had to learn to sing without hurting myself. I would wake up the next day and couldn’t really talk.
Are you a theory guy?
I would have a one-hour interview just about music theory if you wanted to. I got a music minor at UNC, so I took a whole lot of theory classes. I love that stuff. If I could go back I’d turn that minor into a major.
You talked about playing in school band. Were you ever in bands on the scene?
Not before 2015, when I made the decision that I didn’t want to do psychology and wanted to dive into music. That is when I really started going out and playing in public. Before that, I was mostly only playing by myself in my apartment.
So XOXOK, which you started in 2015, is your first major project.
Yep. Thank you for using the word major. [laughs]
What were you listening to / inspired by?
I really wanted to sound like Jeff Buckley. He was and is a big influence, maybe just because of his range. He didn’t have one sound. He could do so many things. I’m not a rapper, but during that time, you couldn’t tell me Drake wasn’t the best artist. That he was laying bare his emotions, that kind of appealed to me at the time. And just like any other guitar player in their early 20s, I was obviously into Radiohead. Moses Sumney I absolutely loved, and still do.
Maybe I’m overstating the classic soul influences I hear on “Right On.”
I love old and newer soul music. “Right On” is a more recent thing, and my music tastes have expanded since 2015. I grew up listening to R&B and oldies in my parents’ car, and whether or not I listened to it actively as a teenager, that music lives in me. In the past five years I’ve started being a lot more active about listening to that stuff again. Part of it is nostalgia, and part of it is that I’ve been listening to a lot of newer R&B. So you’re not overstating that for sure.
Walk me back to when you created “Right On.”
It was a long process. I’m not a “sit down in one session, write a song” kind of guy. I really wish I was. That would be very convenient.
The lyrics came first, after Philando Castile was killed in 2016. That happened the day after I defended my dissertation. A week or two later, I was driving to the gym on campus and listening to a podcast, NPR’s Code Switch, where they talk about race. They had an episode where they said, “We’re paid to talk about this stuff, but we have no words right now.”
Every time one of these shootings happened I’d think, man, that could be me, which was awful enough. But for some reason, that day, I thought, wow, that could be my dad next, and I just pulled over to the side of the road and started bawling. I don’t know why I thought about my dad. That’s where the song came from—that moment and thought process, along with the fact that I’d just gotten my PhD, and people might think I’m protected from this stuff, but I’m not.
The music itself, part of it came from learning about music theory. I was learning about tritones, which is a very jarring sound. I’d learned about them and forgotten many times before, so I said, I’m going to learn about them again and put them in a song where I can remember. The song is nice and melodic until it gets to that part where I say, “Just ‘cause I’ve got a PhD don’t mean they won’t light me right on up,” and that’s where I put that jarring tritone.
“Right On” sounds a lot different from your debut EP, Worthy.
That’s very intentional. Worthy was the stuff I’d been thinking about since college. I implemented that vision and I’m proud of it, and now I don’t want to do it again. It was very wandering stuff that might not have a hook or a bridge. I said, let me see if I can do this thing other people are doing, writing a song with a verse and a chorus, how about that? On Worthy, I was trying to show off my guitar-ing and theory. I’m not a shredder, but I was proud of all the things I could do on the guitar. I tried to make “Right On” less guitar-centric, focused more on the lyrics and feeling of the song.
Tell me about the timing of the release of “Right On.”
I wanted to put out something a year after Worthy and didn’t have enough material ready to record a full album yet. But I had a couple of singles. A few people have said to me, oh, how prescient that you released it this time. And I just want to respond to them like, nope, not really. I could have released this at any time, and it would have been a relevant song. I so desperately wish that it was outdated. It feels selfish to think about my song being attached to these events. Every single one of these shootings adds another layer of stress for me and most or all people of color.
I’m leery of creating the impression that “Right On” is a protest song or some kind of pedagogy for white people about race and privilege. It’s also so personal and bottles that experience you had, driving down the road, thinking of your dad.
It definitely is a very personal song. I think the reason it resonates is that either people can relate to the fear that they or someone they love could be next, or—white people specifically who talk to me about it, it’s not like they’re texting that they didn’t know racism exists, but maybe they feel more like this wouldn’t happen to their friend. It’s a reminder, to both myself and people who see me as their friend: George Floyd was someone’s friend. Philando Castile was someone’s friend. I hope that is what resonates beyond the personal feeling for me.
What’s next?
“Right On” is the most explicit song I’ve released, and not because of the F word, but because I'm not really cloaking things in metaphor, which is a little scary. I usually don’t even talk about what my songs are about. This has given me a bit of encouragement to continue doing that, to not cloak things in metaphor so much. It’s been encouraging to know I can do that and still make a good song. I have a second single I’d planned to release in a couple of weeks, but you know, I’m reading the room—the room being America.
“Right On” was recorded at Overdub Lane in Durham with keyboardist Gabe Reynolds, bassist T.J. Richardson, and drummer Joe MacPhail. Join the XOXOK mailing list here.
Brian Howe lives and works in Durham, North Carolina
