“It’s a reckoning with yourself to decide what kind of perspective you’re going to have, knowing what all’s going on,” says Chicago R&B singer-songwriter Nialand about her new single. The artist’s extensive musical background includes touring as MC Lyte’s official vocalist and collaborating with artists including Lupe Fiasco and Kanye West. In 2019, she made her video directorial debut with “Inside Out,” and now she’s directed four videos to accompany her audiovisual EP, Words and Sounds to Quarantine To. Across the tracks and corresponding self-directed video, Nialand makes a time capsule that holds space for the sorts of reflection that marked her experience of the year’s many big events. In lead single “WASTQT,” the video shows Nialand in a bedroom quietly processing the images of the time.
“The first part highlights the necessity of being still. Sometimes there is just a relief in feeling and having emotions and not knowing what to do. In the beginning stages, we say “All this stuff is happening. What am I feeling? What am I experiencing?” Just being real in those moments before you react to events is important,” the singer-songwriter says. She begins the song by reciting the definition of “perspective,” a word chosen to underscore that we are all experiencing current events differently. However, she believes we can make choices about perspective, saying, “If we just stay inundated with the dark parts of all that’s going on, we won’t have the motivation to be different. We can choose whether to go forward. Or not. “
Even when she sings “words and sounds to quarantine to” over and over, the line feels more like a rosary than an intrusion. This writer knows that our deepest feelings don’t always present themselves in words. “Sometimes there isn’t anything that we can necessarily say as far as a word or language. Sometimes it’s a sound. A cry, a laugh, a culmination of things,” she says. “You’re alone with your thoughts, and there are words associated with those thoughts. There are feelings, and there are sounds associated with those feelings. I wanted to leave my stamp in reflecting the time by leaving the words and sounds associated with the time.”
“WASTQT” could only have been made in 2020, and yet it nearly didn’t get made. Nialand and her team juggled Covid precautions and closures, as well as everyday scheduling obstacles. A number of people came together to realize Nialand’s vision of contemplative stillness. Her songs and videos help us see our own quarantine lives as both our own and part of something vast, something that may or may not even have words to describe it.
