Exapanded listening with Shanté

An interview with the multidimensional creator of The Music Directory

Expanders are people who show you what’s possible by living it. They already have what you desire—the patience, the stable business, the adventures—making it easier to believe you can have them too. Expanders.

Shanté (she/they) is a multidimensional writer, digital curator, mystic, and musician — when she reached out initially to do an interview project I was delighted but I had no idea how strange and tender the connection would go. She has become an expander for how I discover music, for taking chances in my writing, creating human collaboration, and getting clarity about my own artistic purpose.

She writes two substacks: the first is {a filmless score.} that prompts the reader to see film musically and hear music cinematically. There she writes and curates music to film themes like main character energy, the posse, and the meet cute where she weaves her own meet cute with her now-fiancé with soundtrack suggestions.

On her substack {things i collected} style, music, art, wellness, Afrofuturism, queer theory, subcultures, plant-based food, home remedies, crystals, and tarot — so plenty for us to chat about there. We also stumbled upon a shared interest in birthwork; she trained as a doula and I had two home births. One of the pillars of her work is a deep and abiding love for Black music — an adoration I share but one she understands from within the seed itself.

What has unexpectedly filled my cup has been digging through all her thoughtful writing and playlists, it’s like finding the most mindblowing set crates to flip through — a sensation of hot impatient hunger and lingering satiation running through my body simultaneously — like finally! I found it! How am I going to get through all this??

Maybe because she is generationally my junior she has a different vantage point into the sonic textures that I find wildly appealing, whatever it is, she is collecting music veraciously and I’ve never met a curator who has overlapped so closely with my own weird tastes. We both have core influences in soul, r&b, funk, rock, hip-hop, jazz — but we seem to share a high threshold for experimental and sounds that slant. How is that possible? It might be called something like musical kinship.

Shanté, who also goes by Tay, is well-known around Substack for running {The Music Directory} — the repository and catalogue for all Substacks that are doing anything related to music. This labor of love project is what I adore most about the internet — an innovative point of connection that is created simply on the premise of because it should exist! But Tay knows the greatest secret: the internet is not a place to live. Tay is embodying that: yes, create on the internet (prolifically in their case) but don’t forget to close the loop by being a human being with other human beings who you encounter.

I get the distinct sense that Shanté is at the beginning, the conception and gestation phase of something transcendent — ready to take us all to another level of expansion. Right now she is lovingly sharing all the things she’s collected, the expressions her inner child longed to see, but there is something waiting to be born beyond that – I can feel her artistry is taking form in the black cosmos of the womb. Shanté is incubating visions — together we talked about the root of where some of those come from and where she is heading.

Read our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

What was the first piece of music you remember buying for yourself?

I was born in the nineties and grew up in the 2000s, so it was definitely a CD. What comes to mind—is The Fray. I still have the CD. The How to Save a Life album. I remember going to buy it and being like, "Well, this isn't the standard of music that my family listens to." My mom was like, "Who cares? You like what you like, so get the CD if you want it."

Tell me more about that.

At the time as a family we listened to R&B, gospel, boy bands, Christina Aguilera, Mariah Carey or, you know... my sister was the huge Beyoncé fan.

Buying The Fray was like a little bit of a departure from what the culture of your family was listening to, but you were like, "Well, whatever—I like it though."

Yeah, absolutely. My sister and I shared a room and our tastes were very similar. We always liked rock music. Hearing their music on VH1 and then really liking some of the songs and feeling so moved by them, I was just like, "Yeah, I'll buy that CD."

How do you listen to music today — can you walk me through your patterns and habits?

Yeah, absolutely. I am pretty obsessive when it comes to music. When I was more actively working in physical spaces (because I've been working pretty remotely for the last five or so years), music was a huge determining factor—not necessarily if I wanted to work there, but if I enjoyed my time there.

When it comes to my own personal listening, I'm more of a straight-through album listener. A lot of the times, especially when I'm listening to new albums, I'll queue up quite a few albums throughout the day and they'll kind of be soundtracks. But I'm still actively—again—seeing what the song is, seeing who the artist is. If there's something that piques my interest, I'm gonna jot it down or add it to a playlist.

I do like playlists a lot. I make a lot of them, but I often find that when I listen to albums or playlists, there's usually a few songs that I'll get obsessed with, and then I'll just play those on repeat quite often. My music listening is mostly streaming, but I do have a decent record and cassette and CD collection that I write about on my newsletter. I'll split my time doing both things, but most of the time I'm listening to albums all the way through.

When something catches your ear, you don't want that moment to pass you by.

Yeah, absolutely. Either it'll go on one of my thematic playlists or my monthly playlists, or if it's brand new music, I've got a huge master playlist that I build throughout the year that I'll fine-tune. It's marking my experience throughout the year because music is my soundtrack, especially when I go and do things like walk or even go to the grocery store—I mean, there's usually some kind of soundtrack in my mind that's adding to the pep in my step.

Do your playlists also kind of clock phases of your life—sort of chronologically, like seasons?

Yeah, absolutely. Last year, I unearthed a playlist that I had made the day I turned 20 that I had called "The Last Day as a Teenager." It was all of these songs that I had kind of collected through that decade. It's very sentimental— I'm getting teary-eyed thinking about it. Because when I found it, I was just like, "Wow, I still like a lot of those songs, and those songs meant so much to me."

When I turned 30 I made a "The Last Day of My Twenties" playlist. I'm big on playlisting because I do think it's a helpful way of timestamping and marking music during this digital age.

You also have a vinyl collection and a cassette collection and a CD collection?

Mm-hmm. And also plenty of MP3s. I used to be a radio DJ, so there's a lot of songs that I downloaded—some I had to edit, some that I have in the original form. Some music you can't even find anymore because for whatever reason—like let's say the artist used a sample—they can't legally have that music uploaded, but I still have a copy of music like that in my streaming library.

I didn't know you used to be a DJ. Tell me about that.

Yeah, when I was in college, one of the most renowned student-run stations because it had one of the largest wattages, 100,000 watts.

My fiancé and I actually joined at the same time. My good friend, who was actually the general manager at the time, she wanted to host an R&B show. We both liked R&B, but also music that was adjacent to R&B. We had a show called "In Ya Feelin's" that would air from 12 to 2 AM — R&B, neo-soul, and everything in between.

Tell me about your own music—what you like to do and play.

My own music is a work in progress. I've been more on that wave for the last four or five years. Don't really have too much recorded, but I have a lot of drafts and songs written. A lot of it is really just practicing with my voice and recording voice notes of how I want certain things to sound, playing around with sound bowls and bells and things of that nature.

You're writing your own lyrics and all that?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I would say too, I write my own lyrics, but I also do find if there's a popular song or just even a song that I've heard that has some kind of catchy refrain—I'm thinking about how to interpolate it, how it could be flipped to pay homage. That kind of thing also stands out to me.

Imagine your dream music project—money, time, and the bounds of reality are no object—what do you make? Who do you collaborate with? And what do you want people to feel when they hear your music?

Oh, that's such a beautiful question. Instantly what comes to mind is avant-garde, soulful, jazzy R&B— things of a mystical nature. I like the idea of things having Easter eggs to them, like something that people experience and it unfolds upon them.

When it comes to collaborators, instantly I would say Solange, Thundercat, Saya Gray. Oh, Sampha! Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland of Jungle, Leon Michels, Coco O. I feel like between them, I would get a good diverse range of suggestions and also just what they bring to their music, this singular focus of ingenuity. I think that it would really enhance what I'm trying to go with.

And what I would want people to feel is uplifted and empowered—that they have the right to tell their own story in whatever fashion that looks like to them, whether it is through music or through visuals or through the way they dress. Just like taking that bold risk to put out the type of music that I want to hear.

How does your identity inform your music taste, your connections to music, and your music generation?

My identity informs that in various ways. As a Black queer person, the history of Black music, especially Black American music, is very important to me—that those stories are constantly reaffirmed and acknowledged. But also for queer folks, just that outward expression is validated and acknowledged.

Being someone who always has liked a vast variety of things—and my own identity being expansive—I think that allows for me to see beauty in various types of music.

The degrees of separation thing — I'm always kind of thinking about, "Okay, how does this tie to this, tie to this? How do these artists relate to each other?" Then even finding out what this person produced on so-and-so's album. Like, that's really cool.

I do feel that my prior experience with choir and musical theater informs a lot of how I go about crafting the music that I hope to make. I would say too that being a Black person and having this kind of more soulful essence to my voice, I do feel like I'm pulling on specific lineages there as well.