Our theme for the month of June is “Celebrities and Me.” Writers were asked to select and write about a celebrity with whom they feel some connection.

“And so I come to isolation.”

When I heard Moses Sumney croon, “I’m not at peace with dying alone / but I’m not at war with it either,” the words hit me square between the ribs. That’s exactly how I feel, I thought.

Over the past year and a half, partially because of pandemic isolation and partially because I’m a young single woman in her twenties in the Midwest, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want out of relationships—mostly if I want the romantic sort at all. I’ve been flirting with asexuality for a long time, but only recently was I introduced to aromanticism—simply put, a label for someone who doesn’t feel romantic attraction.

Sumney’s first album in 2017 borrowed that same word, Aromanticism, for its title years before it fell into my lap. He dwells in the absence of intimacy—singing about desiring low-stakes hangouts, sending late night texts to your ex, and exposing the unequal power dynamics in all relationships—and questions the idea that romance is “normative and necessary.”

But Aromanticism was not the album with the dying alone lyric; i.e., not the one that caught me in Sumney’s web (though it would make a much cleaner narrative if it was). Instead, græ, Sumney’s sophomore album released in two installments over 2020, held the words that skewered me.

On my first few listens to græ, I focused on the maturing threads from Aromanticism, Sumney’s continued probing of romantic lacking:

• Neither/Nor: “I’m not at peace with dying alone / but I’m not at war with it either.”
• In Bloom: “Sometimes I want to kiss my friends.”
• Me in 20 Years: “I wonder how I’ll sleep at night / with a cavity by my side / and nothing left to hold but pride.”
• Keeps Me Alive: “Though I’ve never been a sucker for codependency / I’m taken by the possibility.”

I really only loved “Neither/Nor,” and I discarded the rest (save “Virile”—I’m a sucker for a kickin’ drum beat).

But when I looped back to græ, researching for this piece, I found that it encompasses more than Sumney’s views on romance. Rather, the album transverses the landscape of grayness, using it as a “metaphor for being in between extremes.” 

Sumney finds himself easily navigating these in-between spaces: “It’s not really something I have to try to do; it’s my experience,” he said in an interview. A child who grew up partially in America and partially in Ghana; a college student who pursued a creative writing degree to appease his parents while he secretly devoured music; a rising star who, right at the start of his career, turned down labels that hungered to turn him into a pop icon; a black male musician who is not an R&B artist but combines soul, folk, jazz, and indie rock; a black man who moved from LA to Asheville, North Carolina—Sumney has spent much of his life not quite fitting the mold.

In an interview with NPR, Sumney draws the connection between græ and himself even clearer:

I think that most people occupy a space of multitudes when it comes to their identities. … But kind of in order to be understood by other people, you have to simplify yourself and shave down all the edges. I wanted to explore that concept and say “What does it mean if I’m not going to shave down the edges?” What does it mean if I say “No. I am complicated and confusing and that’s a thing you can’t simplify to get it.”

As I approached Sumney’s work more critically, this permission to be complicated and confusing felt like a relief. Just because I too am not at war with dying alone did not mean that I had to be aromantic. I could leave my identity within the grayness; I could be neither/nor. 

The message of græ, however, runs deeper than gently chiding my desire to define myself securely. Taiye Selasi, a Ghanian-Nigerian-American author whose words are sampled throughout the album, sums it up: “I insist upon my right to be multiple—even more so, I insist upon the recognition of my multiplicity.” græ as a piece of art testifies to Sumney’s multiplicity, his refusal to shave himself down.

I realized that I as a white woman have always been allowed to be multiple in the eyes of others without much effort on my part. græ tells me, again, that others are multiple too.

Etymologically, isolation comes from “insula,” which means island. I-so-la-tion, isolation which literally means to be islanded! And somebody mentioned this to me the other day—actually my Cape Verdean hairdresser—because I asked her “how do you say this word in Portuguese?” and she said “Isolanda.” Like an island! Like you’re-you’re… you’re… islanded. And I thought—that’s exactly what I’ve been. My whole life. I’ve been islanded. —Selasi, “and so I come to isolation”

Within Moses Sumney’s isolation, I have found myself, but I also have found him.

Alex Johnson

Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.