Aja Monet on the Grammys, Loving Collaboration, and the Musicality of Poetry

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Today's installment: Poet and bandleader Aja Monet just released an excellent new album, The Color of Rain, which follows up her Grammy-nominated When the Poems Do What They Do from 2024. While the previous album had a more explicitly live feel to it, The Color of Rain definitely kicks the door open when it comes to the sounds accompanying her inherently musical poetic style, the result of locked-in collaboration with partner Justin Brown as well as the legendary Meshell Ndegeocello. I was very stoked that Aja was down to talk for the newsletter, and the results of our hour-long chat was a forthcoming and frank discussion on poetry, her artistic process, finding one's place in a harsh world, and much, much more. Check it out:

Talk to me about expanding your sound on this record.
It's been a space of discovery and experimentation. I spent a lot of time, at least in the beginning, working with my partner Justin Brown and my friend Dave, who's an engineer that worked on my last record. He had this ADU unit and garage where we just played and experimented. I shared poems, and Justin made some some stuff, and then we expanded upon it. Meshell told us to get in the studio and figure what vibes we liked, what we liked to listen to, and then send her what we made.

We didn't go into it with a specific intention to make it sound a certain way. I think I'd sent a lot of ideas to Meshell beforehand and messaged her with songs, records, and poems I loved. She wanted to get an idea of what my ear was into, and I have a pretty diverse eclectic range of things that I like—even though people don't see poets as musicians, although I think what we're doing with language is definitely music. She really respected and understood that from the very beginning, and that guided everything. She understood that the poems inherently have music to them, and she wanted to celebrate and support that.

She was measuring and very protective. Whoever she wanted in the room when we got to the studio, she was really determining that based on who she thought could be in the room with no ego and serve the poems in a way that was really about the energy of the poems and bringing the dimensions of them out. I really loved that, because when you're working sometimes with certain kinds of musicians, especially in a male-dominated field, the ego can guide most of the room, and then you're in a battle of egos. But the thing that was beautiful is that everyone in the room was really about serving the poems and what music came through them.

When you hear and listen to the record, you're hearing the versatility of the poetry of sounds that I feel inspired by. There's things that feel very jazzy, soulful, funky, eclectic, and electronic. There's parts where we don't really know what we're doing. I like to joke that I've been developing my love relationship with the rainstick. I can't wait to get as many credits on records as possible as a rainstick musician, so I'm going to be pursuing that full-time, moving forward. But we had a lot of fun with percussive elements that we wanted to bring into the record. It was a departure from the energy of "Let's make a live record with all these jazz musicians." This was a little bit more thought-out and intentional.

Talk to me more about the creative partnership between you and Meshell.
I think we're still discovering it. We're developing our relationship, and it was the initiation of us finding a language that works for us. While Meshell was a huge part of the record and obviously has such an incredible legacy and reputation with her variety of skills, a huge part of the recordmaking process was Justin. Meshell guided the live process of us all recording in the studio, but a lot of the demos were made with me and Justin, and we brought them to Meshell with some sort of structure. There were a few elements where all of us in the studio did everything together live in that moment collaboratively, but Meshell's role was more to guide the energy in the room, which is really important.

You can have a bunch of musicians that are all just trying to jerk off in the studio, but she's really intentional about what the music is serving. She'll say, "I hear this in this key with this BPM." She was a real musical director in the sense of knowing all the roles of the musicians in such an in-depth way that she could help guide and lead them to make some decisions for themselves about how they were going to enter. But a lot of the decisions came from Justin and myself. People know Justin as an incredible drummer that a lot of people have been inspired and influenced by. He's one of these humble geniuses within the jazz community. Him helping me formulate some of the songs was the focal point.

Meshell didn't want to make it. She was very intentional about being like, "This isn't about me. This is about me serving what you all are trying to do. How can I best do that?" She wasn't coming to the studio with a sense of arrogance—even though she's very, very, very arrogant about what she does and knows. She knows how to tell people what to do, and that's a very beautiful skill set. And I'm not saying she tells people what to do for the sake of throwing your weight around and being in control. It's a very feminine, sensitive way. She knows what's needed of the song, and people trust that about her because she's been doing it for so long. She tries to be in collaboration with people who know how to serve the spirit of the music, and that was the goal of everyone in the room at the end of the day.

She was always telling me, "The words are the music. The words are enough." She was so annoyed with me by the end, because when it came to post-production, she was like, "We don't need to do any more, just leave it." And I'm like, "No, but..." A lot of it was thinking my poems weren't enough, and a big part of her role was reminding me, "No, your poems are the reason we're all here." To this day, she still reminds me. As I'm trying to band-lead and tour, she's like, "Remind them." Because people be having all types of feelings when they see Black women bandleaders.

It was a good mentorship to be in her presence—to watch how she moves and holds space in a room, like this very whimsical being. Just the way she pops up, moves around the studio, sits back down and gets back up when an idea comes, and then runs into somebody and whispers in the air. She moves like water, like the wind. It's a very natural, elemental way of being, and I admire it so much that I choose to be around it as much as I can. I see her as a mentor, and I hope to continue to work with her. I see this as the beginning of a longstanding friendship and collaboration.

Talk to me about the performative aspect of recording spoken word and poetry, and how that might differ from live performance.
The first thing I try to be intentional about is that what I'm doing is not spoken word—it's poetry. There's a difference. If I'm just concerned with speaking words, then that's all it is. It's no different than me having a conversation with you. When we're doing poetry, we're doing music. Any true musician or understander of language knows that poetry is music. All verse was made for music when poetry was in its infant stages. The musicality of poems is what makes them effective. When Coltrane is trying to push himself to some kind of depth and meaning, that's all that a poet is trying to do with words.

The difference is how you allow the sounds or words to hit a certain kind of way so that it actually becomes effective, and the meaning crystallizes as you're doing it. You don't even know what you're meaning until you realize the meaning comes to be. That's the beauty of being a poet. It's a way of being, and a relationship to language that complicates the transactional nature of how we treat language these days. People see it as a means to an end—how I can get something, how I can get off in a certain way—and I think that's different than what a poet is doing. They're actually trying to be in relationship with the sounds of the words. There's alliteration, rhythm, tone, meter, syllable counts. There's beats within what's happening.

If you do it enough, it's not different than how musicians take time to practice, versus just rehearsing. That's where study comes in. When it comes time to perform, you have a comfort and relationship to your own practice that allows you to kind of rise to the occasion.When you look at old records of musicians that were recording, it was very expensive, so they had to be ready by the time they came to the studio, which meant spending enough time with your craft to be prepared and feel confident to put it on tape. That's no different than when you're doing poetry. If you're doing it well enough, it becomes second nature—what you breathe, dream, walk with. It's how you embody life. By the time you get to the studio, the goal is to hopefully have sat with something long enough that it's in your body and you're able to express it from that space. That's when it comes out the best—when you're coming to it from an embodied place, versus just trying to read something.

Something else that happens when you're recording is that you're not the reader—you're the author of that moment, and you're being present to the sonic experience of that moment based on the meaning that you're conveying. I feel like recording is not that different than performing—other than there's a little bit more pressure, because you realize you're recording. When you're performing, you're really trying to connect and be as present with the collaborators as possible, so you're not cognizant and self-conscious about, "Oh, someone's going to take this and put it out into the world and a bunch of people are going to hear it." You gotta psych yourself out of even thinking that way when you're recording, and that's not always easy.

With this record, because I wasn't doing it to feel live, and I knew it was more intimate and interpersonal, I was able to lean into and sit back more in myself than I did on my last record—and that elicited a different kind of delivery. You're also listening to a poet that has been touring for two or three years before recording this album, so there's a lot of lessons that I've learned from being with a band on the road—vibing, learning my strengths and limitations, pushing the envelope on what I wanted to do with the meter, tone, and pacing. There's a little bit more oomph, but for most of the poems, we usually chose the first take, and those were my favorite takes.

There are a few that I went and rerecorded, because I was still figuring out the poems.I hate when I just wrote it and I don't really feel it fully in my body yet, because the way that I revise is through sound. I always have to recite the poem over and over again to myself to see how the words sound before I edit them. When it feels off and I don't really feel like I fully had a lot of time to go through that, then I start to get a little self-conscious. I want to be sincere in my tone, and if you do too many takes of something, it starts to water it down and then you lose the magic, the heart of it.

"hollyweird" was one take, and it's crazy that that was the first take. We couldn't have done that again—there's no way. There were too many things in the universe that conspired to make that moment possible, it was just so perfect, too divine. Once you're like, "Okay, that was good," why would you even try to recreate it? With "song of myself," I had this piece I was grappling over that was very intimate and personal. I whispered to Meshell about it in the studio, and she was like, "We're going to cut everybody out. Aja, go in the booth and record the poem alone, and then we'll figure out after." So I did, and then she was like, "Okay, you go home," and I was like, "Damn, why are you telling me to go home?" The next morning, I came back to this crazy production behind it, and what it became is something I could've never imagined. I almost felt uncomfortable with what it became. But I was so much more inspired, and so it was one of my favorite pieces.

Then, I didn't have to be self-conscious about my voice and words being enough for the music to take form. That's the best, to find somebody who really understands that about what you're doing. You feel seen, you feel affirmed, and you feel like you're in your bag.

Talk to me more about the push-and-pull of your creative partnership with Justin.
Well, to disclose, we are in an actual relationship. We are intimately involved in ways that have nothing to do with what our art is, even though our art is a big part of that. There's a deep, profound love, which means that the goal is to to help the other reach their their highest potential. From the jump, you're working with someone that you trust and means well. You don't have to wonder, "Are they just here for a check?" You're just like, "Oh, this person gets me. They know me, and we can start from there." I don't have to tap dance, pretend, or speak about how many things i know. There's no flaunting, which can sometimes happen when people walk into the studio, especially when there's intimidating factors involved or gender dynamics that are like not equal.

I've been in situations where men feel the need to overly assert how much they know more than you in the studio. They use all this jargon to make try to make you feel like you don't know what you're doing. So it's really nice to be in partnership, whether he'ss my partner or not, with someone who's one of the most genuinely humble musicians I've ever met. Someone could be an asshole because of how talented they are. They could be like, "I'm the shit, F all y'all, I'm the best there ever was." But people say that about him. He doesn't need to be that way. Sometimes I wish I could do with words what he does, and there's this admiration for what each other does.

There's mutual respect and devotion to our crafts. My last record didn't feel like that, without getting into it too much. But it's important to note that these dynamics happen when you're creating, and that the shift in power makes people produce and create a certain way, and the music will be affected by that. We were like, "How do we be raw, create together, have some fun, and learn more about each other and about each other's practice?" Because I'm a student of life—I want to learn, grow, and continue to evolve, and I feel like hess that way, too.

And, I mean, come on, to work with Meshell, we were both like, "This is the dream." Justin was playing with me on tour when we played Newport Jazz Festival two years ago, and we saw Meshell play the Baldwin stuff. It was amazing. She got off stage, and one of her musicians, Justin Hicks, said he knew my work and he was a fan. Then Meshell was like, "Yeah, we love you," and then she saw Justin and was like, "Man, you a bad drummer. Justin's the kind of drummer where he beat your ass if you don't get free." [Laughs] I was like, "Oh, my God, that's crazy." Meshell is such a student of music that, when she's listening to people, she's not just listening for what sounds good on a song for the public to enjoy. She's listening for what kind of person you are,what kind of spirit is showing up to the music. Great musicians can do that with each other, just like great poets. I can read in a poet whether or not they're arrogant, have reverence, or are a derivative of someone—and that's the same with musicians.

I've learned from Justin how to listen differently to music—how to be more receptive, curious, and skeptical. There's this beauty that happens when we collaborate that comes from mutual respect, and we felt mothered, nurtured, and mentored by Meshell in growing through this process together. It was really fun. There's some points of tension when you have an idea they don't get it, and you're like, "But we got to try it this way." And then you do, all y'all love it, and then you're like, "See, that wasn't so bad."

It's a relationship that's separate of a loving, romantic, or familiar relationship. It's still a deeply profound relationship though. Sometimes, people act like people don't have struggles in their relationships. The best relationships have that struggle. I always say that conflict is the highest form of intimacy. Where we conflict and differ is actually the most profound part about us. That's not where you run away. That's where you lean in and say, "Hmm, why do we differ? What is it that we're both trying to say? What is our perspective into this doorway that we're walking through?"

The part that I love about Justin is that he's so patient and humble. His main premise by which he comes to the music is, "How do we be of service to this thing that we're creating? How do we reflect that honesty?" I respect that so much about him that it makes me want us to rise to that occasion together.

As far as being a listener of music is concerned, what inspires you?
It's always hard when people ask you this, because you'll be like, "Damn, I listen to everything." I love Georgia Anne Muldrow, who's on the record. I love the greats like Sade, Nina Simone, and Marvin Gaye. There's a bunch of poets I love—Jayne Cortez, the Last Poets, Sekou Sundiata, Sonia Sanchez. I've been returning to Eugene McDaniels lately, because when I gave my new record to a friend of mine, she said that it reminded her of him. I'd heard his music before, but I never really spent a lot of time with it.

There's a horn player, Jacques Corseil, that one of my friends put me on to. He has this record, Trails of Tears, that I fell in love with during my last record. We did a music video, and we were on the road in France, and my friend played this record for me and I was like, "Who is that?" If I were to think about all of the musicians that I love...I mean, I love Meshell, of course. I actually started to spend more time with Meshell's music after I started working with her. When you're playing with her, you're like, "Oh my God, you are a genius." Then you listen back and realize how ahead of her time she was, and how many people have been inspired by her music. I feel the same way about Georgia. I'm still learning from them, but I think about them as GOATs.

I've also been spending a lot more time with Roy Hargrove's work. The RH Factor was always something that meant a lot to me. I love Lonnie Holley, Cody Chesnutt—I'm actually working on trying to bring him out to a festival that I'm curating, what a gem. Bettye Swann, who's getting a lot of love on Instagram these days. I don't know what's going on there—when the TikTok'ers get on something, they start going ham—but I was loving her before all that. Pharaoh Sanders, Garnett Silk. I could go on and on. Alice Coltrane, of course. I go with what makes me feel something.

Have you ever heard Meshell's cover of "Sometimes It Snows in April?"
Yes, I have. A friend of mine sent that to me.

That's something where, the first time I heard it, I was like, "Well, this completely recontextualizes how I hear this song now."
Humans, man. Humans can be really amazing when they want to be. There's some great things about being a human, and sometimes you got to really sit and revel in that, because these days everything's showing you how fucked up we could be. But when I hear Meshell, it's like the best of us, you know what i mean? I were gonna send some stuff to an alien and be like, "Yo, we aren't all that bad, don't bomb the planet," I'd be sending them some Meshell, some Sade, some Whitney Houston. There's some of us that really do something with our time here that makes us feel like it was all worth it. There's times where you're like, "Man, wow, you just took me to another dimension. That made me immensely grateful."

When you were nominated for a Grammy a few years ago, did you go to the ceremony?
[Sighs] Don't remind me. Yes, I did.

I love talking to people who actually end up having to go. A lot of people who watch it on TV are like, "It must be cool to go there," and all the time I'm talking to people who are like, "This sucked, I did not enjoy this at all."
I mean, it's one of those things that mattered more for the community than it did for me. People just didn't ever think someone like me would ever get nominated for something like that. I've just never been one to be awarded by those kinds of institutions, so I feel like it meant something to my people, and the folks that followed and supported the work that I've been doing all these years. So I felt good that people felt proud of me. I mean, obviously, you want people to be proud of you before you ever need any award or acknowledgement. But, people are people, and they want to see folks that they love get acknowledged, and I had to learn that, in that way, it's not about you. It has nothing to do with you, really, in so many ways—from the perspective of the supporters and the people who love you, but also from the perspective of the industry, how it is, how it works, and how that system came to be and exists. It's all a lot of shenanigans, and you realize that there's a lot of politics to that ethos of being.

When I went into it, I thought, "Oh my God, it's the Grammys." You come with this naivete, this fresh spirit, this idea of everybody wanting you to win, in your mind. And then you realize, no, actually, other people aren't about who deserves to win. or who actually puts the quality of work into it. It says nothing about your artistry. It says more about the timing, the chance that people invested in you, the things that conspired to make it happen. Sometimes, people have more conspiracy than others. It was a humbling experience in that regard, because I saw a lot of things before I even got nominated that started to hint to me, "Oh, this is a setup. There's more to this than what people have told me." As I got into it and saw more deeply what was taking place, I was like, "Man."

If I win a Grammy, I'm not gonna be mad at it, but it's not gonna change the price of milk or eggs. I make this joke that I should've never let the Grammys hit. It's like this thing that you wake up from the next morning where you're like, "Oh my God. I let you in my bed! That's crazy. How did that happen?" It's like when you hook up with somebody and you look back and you're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I did that. That's crazy." That's how it felt with the Grammys.

I'm always telling people who don't have anything to do with the music industry: If you care about music, you should not care about the Grammys.
No. And let me say the reason why, too: That's nothing to do with winning or losing. It's the fact that the Grammys has too much money to not make that experience enjoyable for the artist. As a working-class artist, the music industry has made too much money off of musicians to not allow musicians to enjoy, at the very least, the experience of being with other musicians to celebrate all the hard work that came into even getting a record to be in a position where it could be acknowledged by the Grammys.

The most depressing part about it is that none of us got to enjoy the fact that we were all there together in a real, beautiful, profound way. It's such a missed opportunity, and it feels intentionally disgusting that they would bring all these people together who sacrificed their blood and sweat to come there—and they don't even offer you a cup of water for free. You don't even get peanuts. The year I went, they started charging a thousand dollars for a ticket. It's ridiculous. On top of that, the day of the Grammys, it was pouring rain. They had no preparation for the artists—people in gowns and fancy outfits they rented, who brought their families, aunties, uncles. Everybody was so there to be celebratory, but y'all can't even hold up some umbrellas for people. You don't even have hamburgers to make sure people can eat—some fries, some salad, some nuts, something! Some people were there from 10 a.m. until the evening. You got to hope you run out and find food somewhere.

The process could be more enjoyable for the artists—and that doesn't mean that everybody has to take home a trophy. At least let us leave with our dignity. That's the part I don't like about that whole process. Forget the trophy—don't make people go through that whole process where they literally have so many people invested in them, and you can't even offer them some crackers with some cheese. And to be fair, I'm a foodie, So if you don't take care of people with food, that shows me your whole value system. You're not interested in actually looking after people, which is so important. So why are we doing it? Anyway, you got me started. I'm gonna stop.

You graduated from Sarah Lawrence, right?
Yes, I did. I'm one of them Sarah Lawrence girlies.

I spent a bit of time up there hanging out with people while I was in college, it's obviously a very specific place to study at in a few ways. Talk to me about what that experience was like for you.
It was nice, it was what I needed. In retrospect, coincidence—if traced back far enough—becomes inevitable. When I look back at things, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that was supposed to happen. That's what produced the person I am, and I wouldn't have it any other way." So Sarah Lawrence was the kind of schooling that I needed for the type of person I am, and thank God there was a school in the world that could encourage and nurture the intricacies of my questions about life, philosophies, and your ideas around the world.

The type of student that does well at a place like Sarah Lawrence isn't one that's trying to be a follower and regurgitate information back to you. There's a joke about Sarah Lawrence students having these obscure, weird concentrations, and the more weird they were, the more Sarah Lawrence they felt. Being in an educational institution that encouraged this discovery of self, in collaboration with others who were really trying to delve deeper into what kind of world we want to create—that was the best part of being at Sarah Lawrence.

But it was a very wealthy institution, and it's privileged in the sense that, the type of students that get to go there and have that ability to do that...we used to joke that it was like all these rich people's effed up kids. Their parents couldn't get them to run their business or get them into the colleges that they were hoping to get them into. "Oh, you didn't make it to Harvard? Go to Sarah Lawrence. You're the one that just wants to smoke weed, make films, and talk about ideas." You had the protection of wealth, that's the school some kids would be sent to. But then there was some of us who didn't have that privilege and really had to fight our way into carving out a space for ourselves in our communities. We found each other there, off the beaten path—kids who might've also been othered in more profound and interesting ways. That was compelling and birthed new ideas and sparked really great philosophies in you.

It was so exciting to collaborate with your professors in a way that they felt invested. Some of my greatest professors that I ever had were at there—Komozi Woodard, Jeffrey McDaniel, Thomas Sayers Ellis, who passed recently. There was a lot of great people who came and continued to come through through Sarah Lawrence. But it wasn't always easy, because as a young Black kid from the city that was a little sheltered in the way I was brought up—even though I was from the city, just meeting people with wealth, that changes everything, the ability for you to really grasp, "Oh, some people really don't have the same challenges as you—and when they do fuck up, they have a lot of things to protect them when that happens."

Some of the things I saw students go through, they had to go through therapy and get help, where other people I know growing up went and got locked up. You learn that there's a different path for certain people when you have different resources and different parents that can help provide those resources, and that was shocking and culture-shifting. But it was a great education. There was no exams, you get to interview professors, you had to write these long-ass essays and research papers about anything you wanted to in the field that you were in. One of my greatest professors ever, Marvin Frankel, changed my life. It sets this precedence of what kind of education you're going to get. What a privilege to have gone there.

I will say like living on and around the campus was hard at times. Some of my first real harsh racial discriminatory experiences happened on or around that campus. It's that tension of being so close to the city, but you realize that the KKK ain't that far, you know what I mean? You think, "It's the north, it's New York everybody's liberal."

Yeah, there's a lot of rich, white assholes in the area around Sarah Lawrence.
But, also, Yonkers is not that far. There's a lot of Black people in Yonkers. We used to go to Yonkers Raceway right at the mall to go to the Boston Market. Let me tell you, that Boston Market saved us a lot of times for dinner. You used to go there and you'd see everyday people. The working class was never too far, even the people who worked on the campus. Yes, you go one way and there's these big mansions and houses, but you go the other way and it's the hood. The class consciousness becomes very sobering in that contrast.