Season 3, Episode 1:  “A Really Bad Deal” ft Annahstasia

Narration: Remember when Prince changed his name to a symbol in an act of rebellion over the label’s relentless attempts at control? Or how about David Bowie? He was famous for tussling with his labels (plural) when they would push him to experiment less. It’s almost an archetype. When an expectation of ROI, that’s return on investment in business speak, is met with a creative work that cannot be categorized, marketed and therefore seemingly sold with ease? Well, you can pretty much guarantee a power struggle is coming. 

Now the examples I gave above are famous, legendary even. But what about the independent artists, the emerging ones?  How does an artist like that manage conflict? Maybe even when they are still a minor? Maybe even with the people on their own teams, who are supposed to have their best interests at heart? Maybe even when that artist is struggling to survive? 

What happens when saying "yes" to yourself, means saying "no" to the industry?

I first came across the music of Nigerian-American singer-songwriter Annahstasia late last year on social media. I was scrolling while unceremoniously waiting for laundry, and suddenly out of the blue her deep, resonant voice boomed into my headphones, she took me right out of the fluorescent lit hallway where I was standing, forced my eyes closed and sunk me smack dab into my own inner world, skin all alive with goosebumps. Who was this? I went deep into the rabbit hole of Annahstasia and the more songs I heard, the more I was hooked. Only later did I learn that to get to this sound, she had been ground through the mill of labels, and executives, and corporate grooming. But just by hearing her voice and the warm folk sounds that she offered, I knew she had managed to not stay there, to insist on her freedom, to insist on her sound, and I had to find out exactly how.

My name is Meklit, and this is Movement, music and migration, remixed. 

Meklit: Annahstasia, here we are!

Annahstasia:  Ooh, you’re going to sing it for me?

Meklit: I like singing names. It somehow, like it starts things off right. What can I say.

Annahstasia:  Yes! It lifts the spirits

Narration: Annahstasia was born into a family of artists. Her parents met in Los Angeles, as part of the 1980s LA art scene. Her father is from Arondizuogu, Nigeria, her mother is from Wisconsin, and they were both trying to make a living in fashion design. They didn’t come to the game with wealth already in their pockets, but what they did have was a community that showed up for them, and helped them survive, including folks like Tina Marie and Lenny Kravitz. 

And as she got older and into music, Lenny Kravitz kept an eye out from a distance, like a cool, supportive uncle.

Annahstasia:  And like when I started making music, I got kind of a conciliatory nod like, okay, we’ll see if she's serious. 

Narration: She was serious. And a decade into making music, she got an unexpected call. 

Annahstasia: Lenny called me and he's like, do you have a band? Do you have the music prepared? Are you ready to go? Tour starts in two weeks.

Narration:  That invitation was to be the opening act for the European leg his Raise Vibration world tour.

Annahstasia: Getting a tour offer for like Europe two weeks out is literally insane. That doesn't happen.

Meklit: That’s crazy! 

Annahstasia: Yeah, exactly. Like, that's what? 

Narration: She had just turned 24 and knew this was the kind of opportunity that could change her life. So when the offer came, she had to make it happen.

Annahstasia: I called my mentor at the time, Jahi Sundance. And through the network, we found this church band from Connecticut that was ready to go. They all flew in, we learned the songs in, like, four days. 

Meklit: Wow!

Annahstasia: And me and these five dudes I just met got on a plane to Istanbul and our first show was in Sofia. 

Meklit: In Bulgaria? Wow. 

Annahstasia: In Bulgaria, yes. And the tour itself was such a euphoric feeling. It was very affirming for my, my career because I got on that stage and like, I didn't even feel, I didn't feel one shred of fear, it just felt like exactly where I should be.

Narration: There are moments when you feel like what you’ve always dreamed is right at your fingertips. Like when you’re on stage, everything it took to get there, all the struggle, it just falls away. You're not thinking about the industry, about ticket sales, or budgets, or metrics, it's just you and the audience connecting.

Annahstasia: And I remember Lenny commenting that he was like, are you sure this is your first time doing an arena tour? I'm like, yeah. And he's like, well, doesn't look like it. And then he stalked off to his dressing room.

Meklit: That's amazing feedback.

Annahstasia: And it was just fun. Like I got to pretend I was a rock star and I had like a full rock band, and that was kind of a crazy place to crash from. 

Narration: The tour began in the spring of 2019. And by its end that summer, Annahstasia was on her way back to the US. She had all this momentum, but once she got home to LA, the resources to sustain it, didn’t follow.

Annahstasia: The most disheartening question I was getting was, so when's your next tour? And keep in mind it just took an army, a village, to like make that tour happen, and I was like 20k in credit card debt because of that tour. So when someone asked me, when's your next tour, all I wanted to do was cry.

Narration: What's so remarkable about Annahstasia's story, is that this arena tour at age 24, was not even her first brush with the big-time music industry. She had already been through it once, at an even earlier age. 

Annahstasia: I was discovered professionally when I was 17 by a label under Warner Brothers. They wanted me to be some combination between Adele and Rihanna, which

Meklit: Doesn't relate

Annahstasia: I think they just,  doesn’t make sense

Meklit: Where'd you get that?

Narration: There's this unspoken understanding that the industry places race boundaries around genre. No matter how genre-blending or innovative the music is, the sound of Black artists often gets categorized as "Urban", or "R&B", or "Soul",  even when it's obviously not. It's coded language. Just this year Beyonce called it out in her Grammy speech after winning Country Album of the Year for Cowboy Carter. 

Archieval:  Oh my God, I'd like to thank all of the incredible country artists that accepted this, this album. We worked so hard on it. I think sometimes genre is a cold word to keep us in our place as artists. And I just want to encourage people to do what they're passionate about.

Narration: Genre definitions essentialize. Yet artists constantly hear that narrative that without industry support, going big will simply not happen. You want a number one hit? and world tours? Well there’s a high price for that, give up control of your image, your sound, your time, your money, your story. For some, it hardly seems worth it. 

Annahstasia: People often ask me why I don't make Afrobeat or why I don't rap. Because that's not, that's not what I was raised on.

Meklit: Wow

Annahstasia: Like my father played a lot of Fela. He played a lot of Miriam Makeba, but then he also played a lot of like, obscure artists, Eurythmics, Brian Eno, he loved Bizet. We listened to a lot of Mozart, we listened to Tupac, we listened to Sade, we listened to Fiona Apple. So how can I, as now an adult woman or a young adult woman at the age of 17 or 18 be expected to now cosplay in a culture that I don't know anything about.

Meklit: Right, right. 

Narration: Annahstasia signed what’s known as a 360 deal with Warner Brothers when she was 18 years old. In these deals, the label typically takes a cut of the artist's earnings from almost every aspect of their career. So any money coming in from music sales, streams, live performances, merchandise, endorsement deals, licensing, even acting roles in movies or TV, the label gets a percentage.

Annahstasia:  So that's to my voice, that's to my image, that's to my name, and anything that I do with those three things. So if I wrote a book, they'd own it. If they own my publishing, it was like a really bad deal, but I didn't know any better and there wasn't money for lawyers 

Narration: Annahstasia tried to make the best of a stiff deal, but from the beginning, the label pushed her beyond comfort and further into exploitation. 

Annahstasia:  There was a bit of pressure to start talking about things that I wasn't ready to talk about, like sex, and  around the time when I started saying no, when I was like, this isn't me, this isn't me, I fell out with that label, asked to leave, and they just said no. I didn't have any recourse, so the only option I could, had was to just go back to school and stop making music, until I could figure out how to get out of that contract. 

Narration: And that’s what she did. She was accepted to Tufts University and headed to the Northeast. She didn’t immediately pursue music in her studies, but she couldn’t ignore that call for long. By her junior year, she enrolled in a dual degree program with the art school at her university despite her parents' wishes. 

Annahstasia: And I came home from college that year and I remember talking to my dad about it.  And he was just kind of like very knowingly was like, I mean, I did tell you you could do whatever makes you happy, but you understand that this is like one of the hardest things you could choose to do. And I know that from such a realistic place. Like, I've seen him go through so much, sacrifice so much. And then also to have a dream that's larger than yourself stuck in your head without the resources to execute it. Like, I've seen that and what that does to you mentally, to your health, to your general well being. And I chose this path with my eyes fully open, and I'm really grateful for that because I think if I had parents who weren't artists, then I would have been going into this even more blind than you already are because there is no determined path.

Narration: Her junior year of college was the first time she claimed the title of artist for herself. And it was also the year her major label contract came to an end. Finally she had the freedom to make music on her own terms, and she wrote her first solo release, a project called Sacred Bull. But even though there wasn't a label shaping her sound behind the scenes, she came up against another boundary: one from within.

Annahstasia: I was still in the mindset of like trying to make industry forward music. 

Meklit: Right.

Annahstasia: And I wasn't sat in my voice, like I wasn't, I wasn't myself and I was still giving a lot of myself away to the producer and letting them kind of craft my sound and my image.

Narration: Annahstasia describes Sacred Bull as her version of trying to make Pop or R&B music, but the result was something more alternative. And it was that release that got the attention of Lenny Kravitz and led her to the stage in Europe. On tour, she was playing songs from Sacred Bull, but in a new light. 

Annahstasia: When I toured with Lenny, we played only with live instruments. And so the entire sonics of the project did change and became more associated with what I would have liked originally. And that train, it was just like moving, moving, moving, moving. But then as soon as I got back from tour, I couldn't find a manager. I still couldn't find a label.

Narration: This was also around the time the Covid lockdowns began. Annahstasia found herself in a place of complete uncertainty of what was next. But what she did have was a lot of time for herself. 

Annahstasia: At first it was really disheartening but it gave me this space the spaciousness to reconstruct my musical identity from scratch. I picked up my guitar again. Because this whole time I had abandoned the guitar because when I was with the label, they told me I was only writing songs to kill yourself to. That's a quote. The songs were too depressing, nobody wanted to hear that from me. So I kind of like left my guitar behind for a long time. But in Covid, I picked it back up, I started playing it again. And I revived all these songs that I had written when I was 18, 19, and then a few that I had written in college. And I thought to myself, I think I need to make the album that I wish I would have been allowed to make when I was 18, which was a folk album. Because that's what I fell in love with. That's what made me love music. That's what brought me to start singing. 

Narration: She sourced a little bit of funding from, and I quote, her stimmy check. And with that, she recorded the album that had been in her heart all these years, Revival.

Annahstasia: In the process of it, I rediscovered a love for making music that remapped my trauma around being in the studio, working with men, working with other musicians. I was so used to people taking advantage of me and telling me who I should and shouldn't be. And then me, being who I am, being very much like, no, and then losing opportunities because of that. Because I wasn't willing to bend. When I finally got a chance to just do it my way, it clicked for a lot of people. And the right opportunities started to come in, the right team members, the right lawyer, the right manager, the right tour booking agent. All those things started to slot in because I was finally making the music that I had wanted to make from when I was 18, but I got so derailed by the industry.

Meklit: You know, it reminds me of how Nina Simone always used to hate being called a jazz artist. She was like, I'm a folk artist. I mean, she was also a classical pianist and then wasn't allowed to do that. But being a jazz singer was its own pigeonhole, you know? And everybody's always trying to simplify and you're like, no!

Annahstasia: Simplify

Meklit: The beauty is in the complexity, you know.

Annahstasia: And there’s racialization in that as well.

Meklit: Mhm. That's right.

Annahstasia: I was often put in R&B and when I clearly, what I do is not R&B. 

Meklit: No.

Annahstasia: But because I'm Black, I open my mouth to sing and immediately it's R&B.

Meklit: Right.

Annahstasia: And back then it was Soul or Jazz for Black people.

Meklit: And to decide what a music is with your eyes makes no sense

Annahstasia: No, what folk is to me is taking the knowledge and the culture of the time and responding to it musically. Giving it its musical mirror. It's lyrical mirror and you're in the position of being a griot for time. Even me calling myself a folk musician, I do so with great humility because I don't really know how much I'm helping. I would like to say that I'm helping, I like try to only write songs that are really universal and aren't about me, that are about the most common denominator of experience. And throughout my journey, I hope that I'm able to write songs that are, that help people contextualize the ways in which they need to enact revolution in their life, because I don't think my role is on the front lines. I don't think I'm the person that's standing there in front of the police barricade. I don't think I'm the person that's putting my body in the line. And, but the person who is doing that needs that. And that's what folk music is. It's always been the music of the people, whereas pop is the music of the system.

Meklit: Wooo!

Annahstasia: I think that's the relationship between the two.

Meklit: I love that. I love that. 

Annahstasia: The idea of selling out to me is very much present because of the politic of where I think my music comes from, I don't know how much I can engage in the regular markers of success, if what I'm saying is that I want to be, I want to be a voice for positive change, but then do you need the platform to be that voice? And then at what point does a compromise begin to taint the intention? That's a constant conversation for me.

Meklit: But you're also very clear. Like, show me an artist who doesn't wrestle with big questions and I don't know, you're not showing me an artist, you know? Like, it's just not, that's not a thing. Like, it's all, it's more about where is there clarity, and where are the things that get worked out along the way? And like you were talking about, like the right support, the right relationships, the right structures help you do this, I mean, I don't even want to call it a social, it's not just a social role. It's like, it's a calling.

Annahstasia: Yeah. It's definitely a calling.

Narration: Annahstasia’s debut full length album is called Tether. It's out on Juneteenth and you can find it wherever you listen to music. 

This episode of Movement was produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our sound designer and co-founder is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World and we are distributed by PRX.