SERPENTWITHFEET SHEDS HIS SKIN ON 'SOIL'

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For Josiah Wise, the idea of the traditional fairy tale, set in an imaginary land and filled with imaginary beings, is dead. “I don’t think fairy tales have to be a destination wedding [nor take place] in a far-off land where there are trumpet weeds and mockingbirds,” says the musician, better known as serpentwithfeet. Fittingly, in his music, Wise tells stories that are as vibrant and whimsical as they are graphic and entrancing. He sings the love songs of a gay black man, embracing his desires and employing intimacy to nurture his feelings in order to ground his soul, as on his much-awaited début full-length album, aptly titled soil, out today in a partnership between Secretly Canadian and Tri Angle Records.

Further developing Wise’s own version of dark-yet-whimsical R&B, the vocal-forward soil features eleven tracks written and produced by Wise, with some production and writing help from Katie Gately, mmph, Clams Casino (A$AP Rocky), and Paul Epworth (Adele). The album is a follow-up to his eerily ethereal Haxon Cloak-produced 2016 EP blisters, which got the attention of many, including Björk, resulting in a duet remixing the avant garde songstress’ single “Blissing Me” into a sultry and silky R&B song.

Deeply influenced by his long stint in the church boys’ choir in his native Baltimore and his classical training at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Wise’s orchestrations combine choir-inspired vocal layering and operatic storytelling with live instrument recording and avant garde production. Often speak-singing in his own form of sprechgesang, Wise tells stories of dreams and realities using words and textures—a technique he’s been polishing since before his move to New York in 2013. Originally dead-set on becoming a classical singer, Wise’s plan didn’t pan out when he was not admitted to a graduate-level conservatory. Recalibrating, he spent a few months in Paris before moving to New York City, where he worked in retail while trying to create a sound that felt like his own.

“It’s been very important for me to ask: What do I think? Or what do I know?” says Wise over the phone from his Brooklyn home, “to trust my own resolution.” Now twenty-nine, having this courage is something Wise learned how to do while going through an identity crisis last year. “I made myself a visitor in my own house,” he explains. “For a long time, I would listen to everybody’s opinions. I always thought that other people knew some secret that I wasn’t privy to. I lived my life constantly wondering if I was living wrong.” A firm believer in chaos theory and the butterfly effect, Wise feared turning twenty-eight, worrying he would either make some “terrible life decisions” or “go crazy.” But as hard as they were to go through, those days turned out to be, as he describes, “the most rewarding of my life.” “You question everything,” he adds. “My whole world collapsed! Everything changed—my friend group changed, my love life changed, my idea of adulthood changed.” In the end, Wise ended up embracing the hardship: “All the nutrients are in the difficulty.”

In Western culture, the color brown is a symbol of death and decay, but to Wise, it signifies life and futurism—he preaches that soil allows trees to grow, bees to pollinate, oxygen to generate. Inspired by the transgressive nature of artists like Brandy, Prince, Missy Elliott, and D’Angelo—and particularly enthralled by the music and visuals of D’Angelo’s album Voodoo, both for its “beautiful snapshot of black music” and “how brown and black that album [art] was”—Wise says he “wanted [a title] that felt brown.” In preparation for recording soil, he collaged brown papers onto a brown board for visual inspiration. “I wanted the album to feel brown and I wanted it to feel like it had roots,” he says. “I wanted it to feel very close to the ground, so I named my album soil.”

This groundedness echoes in a song like “waft,” about the lingering scent of a lover’s pheromones. As symphonic sounds beat against a chain-link fence, Wise sings, “Already I need you/Someday I’ll plant seeds with you.” The inspiration for the track came as a story. “I always imagined that I was in a building that was made of clay,” says Wise, painting the scene of a black-tie affair set in a structure made of mud with the “wind whipping through the building, almost like it’s going to collapse.” The vocal layering paired with the orchestrations brings grandness and, as an audible wind howls, Wise sings, “I thank the breeze that wafted across my soul/I know your scent/Will be the scent of peace/In my home.”

Wise’s classical training shows itself in the baroque undertones of the tracks, contributing to their controlled grandeur that is a direct correlation to how he sees the world. “I think there is always the intention in my work where I’m thinking about the world being very large,” says Wise. Immersed in and endlessly inspired by his favorite black creators, including author Toni Morrison, he aims to paint a picture with his lyrics. “I’m always interested, and have always been interested, in feeling like you’re in a place, but that place is also still full of whimsy and wonder, even if it’s just in the bedroom.”

At the apex of the album sits “cherubim,” its most danceable track. Wise’s self-proclaimed favorite is both a hymn and an opera filled with metaphors of devotion to a lover. “Boy, every time I worship you/My mouth is filled with honey,” sings Wise. Using a thumping sigh as the four-to-the-floor beat, his piety comes to life in the video directed by Allie Avital. Over one year in the making, the video opens with an image of dancer Vinson Fraley lovingly swaddling Wise, not dissimilar in form to a Pietà. Fraley was always Wise’s only choice for playing his “brother-husband.” “Ever since the song was a demo, [I knew] that I wanted to do the video with a black man,” says the musician. “I wanted a black man to be my love interest because that’s just accurate in real life.” As they dance and vamp in matching garb through the different rooms of a decrepit beige house, the bellowing echo of the chorus sings, “I get to devote my life to him/I get to sing like the cherubim.” “It was important for me to marry this ominous quality with something a bit more jocular,” he says. Musing about the public nature of romantic relationships, he adds, “I think a lot about how romance and love are a communal effort.”

The grandness that envelops Wise’s sound also comes across in his live performances. Always playful and never scared to test if the audience is really listening, Wise sings through his emotions, dropping the occasional joke as he improvises riffs and runs, echoing a tradition in gospel music. Melodramatically (his word) cavorting across the stage, waving around his pom-pom, appropriately named his “drama pomma,” Wise takes ownership of the stage and the audience, alternating singing while playing the piano and serenading front and center over more electronic and bass-heavy portions of tracks.

Recent additions to his live shows are Mondawmina & Ova’East, a pair of life-sized dolls—one male and one female—made in his likeness that originally debuted at his Red Bull Music Festival set last month, which also had about sixty dolls distributed around the room for attendees to take home. Wise has a well-documented love for the toys. “I think everybody has a love of dolls, I just think most people decide that it’s become childish and stop,” he offers, admitting he too had a period during which he lost his dedication. Getting caught up in the “should’s” he says, “I forgot about that nurturing of the imagination.” But after finding himself “becoming a little more sterile than I would have imagined,” he explains that he “knew that I needed to welcome that play back in my space.”

Self-aware and often reflective, Wise had to come to terms with himself and come into his own to fully become the person he is as serpentwithfeet. “My most important tool now is being able to be quiet enough to hear what my self is saying, being able to be patient enough,” he says. It also meant coming out to his religious Christian family and proudly using gendered pronouns in his lyrics. Taking a cue from his stage name, Wise has clearly shed his skin. As he says, “Life for the snake means constantly shedding and I think that is true for every living thing.”

soil is out today.