Culture & Community | Music | Arts & Culture | Arts & Anti-racism
Ro Godwynn. Jeremy Grier Photo.
Before there are ever words, sound blankets the track. The vocals wind their way upward, so smooth and round a listener can almost reach out and touch them. Synth-kissed, echoey keys roll out beneath them, waiting for the beat to drop. When it does, it feels like breathing.
Could I be your favorite? a voice asks, and a listener can feel the question alive and humming beneath every note.
That sound ushers in Ro Godwynn’s “Form,” a new single from the New Haven-based artist that is part meditation, part offering, and part letter to herself. After releasing The Godwynn Experience Vol. II over a year ago—and looking further inward—she has returned with a piece that is deeply introspective and also meant to empower fellow artists and listeners with a message of self-love.
"'Form' is one of those songs that kind of brings me back to myself,” she said on a recent episode of “Arts Respond” on WNHH Community Radio. “And [it] gives me an opportunity to say, like, 'You're still, like, in this world. And you're still navigating these things with yourself and for yourself. You get to treat yourself with deep love and care and compassion as you're going through these things that are hard.’”
The bones of the song have been over a year in the making. In 2020, Godwynn was collaborating with a fellow artist, with whom she became “really close really fast,” she said. In her mind, she was trying to figure out what their partnership was. Then without warning, the two had a falling out. Through a silence that simmered and crackled between them, the song “kept coming back to me.”
She saw it as a meditation that she could sing back to herself, she said. In the quiet that had replaced their friendship, she started creating.
She picked up her guitar, and began playing it for small audiences and Instagram viewers, adding it to a rotation of songs that also includes a sort of prayer-meets-manifestation. Each time, she said, she’d ask listeners to “just close their eyes and think of the part of themselves that they don’t like the most.” Then, as people were listening, she’d ask them to imagine that much-maligned part of themselves singing the song.
The title is meant to hold that sense of contradiction, she said. People, herself included, are constantly taking and retaking form. That they are, by the simple fact of being alive, works in progress.
“You have you, and your relationship with yourself is something worth investing in,” she said. “And it can be a site of many miracles, and a site of much love and compassion if you let it. As I was writing, I was thinking about what it feels like to be deeply loved, and having a place to come home to, or a person that you consider home. Like … why can’t I be that for myself?”
For months, Godwynn has also been thinking about her relationship to her own bodily autonomy—what it means “to be a powerful person” as an artist, a creator, and a queer Black person—in a world of people and forces that try to undermine it. For her, that’s shown up in different ways, from organized religion to places of employment.
The song doesn’t put a period on those thoughts, she said: it’s more of a reminder that she’s got herself, and a circle of support she can turn to for help. Each time there’s a national or global trauma—the fall of Roe V. Wade, for instance, and more recently the death of Mahasa Amini—it reinforces the power and weight of choosing self-love and autonomy over a given set of expectations. That’s visible even in early drafts of the song, as she finds the right chords on a guitar and hums along until the time seems right for the lyrics to come in.
“I’ve been really leaning into this ethos of power being something that I seek only for myself and only over myself,” she said. “And I think that the people who seek power over me—to me, it’s beginning to signal or signify a lack of power that they feel that they have over themselves.”
The result is a piece of music that feels like a gift and a supplication all at once, still open-ended at its finish (a good excuse, perhaps, to come back to it over and over again). As it blooms over the track, there’s something slow-jammy and lush, more sound bath than smoldering. After coming in with her first question—Could I be your favorite? The one you mention when you say you made it home?—Godwynn adds layers, until a viewer is floating through her voice. This is a song that takes its time, and listeners are better for it.
It’s also part of an evolving and more intimate relationship Godwynn has with herself, she said. When she performs “Form”—and now, when listeners come back to the recording—she’s singing it both to herself and to those who can receive it with open ears. Since releasing the song last month, she said, she has continued to work on new music that has a yet-to-be-announced release date.
“I think that listening to this song and being in this space with this song has kind of made me a more audacious person,” she said. “It’s kind of penetrated my subconscious … like, look, I’m still growing. And I’m still learning. And if there are people on the outside who aren’t messing with me for being me, for just inherently who I am, that’s not a me problem.”
Listen to the full interview about “Form” on WNHH Community Radio, one of our content sharing partners, above. Learn more about Ro Godwynn’s work here.