REAYA

New Orleans, Louisiana · b. 2000 · FARA Records

REAYA (Reaya Charbonnet, b. 20 January 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana) grew up in a house where the air conditioning never quite worked and the front door stayed open until October. Her mother's family came down from the Mississippi Delta two generations back — Sunflower County, then Baton Rouge, then here — and the guitar came with them: a scratched metal-bodied resonator that lived on top of a wardrobe and was played about four times a year, always by her grandmother, always badly and always brilliantly. That instrument is the reason this record sounds the way it does, and the reason the slide on it is an inheritance rather than a reference. She's been singing before she can remember, in the way that's completely unremarkable in New Orleans and would be a whole origin story anywhere else; what took longer was working out what to do with it. She spent her early twenties on other people's club records — bounce features, a house EP that went nowhere, three years of session work — and describes the entire period as looking for something in rooms it was never in.

Warm, unforced and slightly worn, with a natural bend in it that sits very close to the slide guitar — she and the resonator are singing the same shape, which is the whole trick of the record. She doesn't belt and doesn't decorate; the hook is four words repeated and it works because she delivers it the same way every time, like a thought she can't put down. She also plays the resonator herself, badly by her own account and well enough that the take on the record is hers. Her influences run through her grandmother first and genuinely, then the Delta slide tradition on her mother's side, New Orleans R&B and bounce on her father's, and the UK club records she found on the internet at seventeen and couldn't explain to anybody around her. She's more interested in what a repeated phrase does over eight bars than in any melody she could write.

Very still on stage — she sings a repeating hook without moving and lets the room do the moving, which reads as either serene or unnerving depending on how close you're standing. Genuinely funny in private and almost never in public, with a long memory for people who were helpful early. The resonator on the record is her grandmother's, brought down from Sunflower County two generations ago and played about four times a year ever since; the take that made it onto the record is the third one she did. She sings the hook exactly the same way every time, on purpose — producers have asked her to vary it and she's explained, once each, why she won't. Steady, dry, patient.