Singing Out to the Back Wall

Frontwoman and guitarist of her band, the Seratones, AJ Haynes racks-up an impressive vitae over the last two years including performing in NPR’s Tiny Desk, touring the United Kingdom, spotlighting in British Vogue, featuring in Nylon Magazine, and recognized in Fender’s Jazzmaster’s 60th anniversary.

article by VANELIS RIVERA | photography by ANDREW BAILEY

J Haynes pauses the BayouLife interview as a plane buzzes over Ki’ Mexico in Shreveport, Louisiana. While initially annoying, she almost instinctively matches the pitch of the encompassing whooshing of the engines. Throughout the interview, Haynes speaks in a steady, low voice that demands total attention. Her careful word choices and nuanced ideas have the ability to engulf like mist, and when she sings, there’s no telling whether what comes out will be a slow burn, a wildfire, or a complete combustion.

Frontwoman and guitarist of her band, the Seratones, Haynes racks-up an impressive vitae over the last two years, including performing in NPR’s Tiny Desk, touring the United Kingdom, spotlighting in British Vogue, featuring in Nylon Magazine, and recognized in Fender’s Jazzmaster’s 60th anniversary. Her prodigious musical journey has smalltown roots. Born in Yokosuka, Japan to a mother from Ilocos, Philippines and father from Columbia, Louisiana, her multifaceted upbringing led her to hone her powerful singing voice first at a Methodist church in Japan and then, upon moving, at the Brownsville Baptist Church in Columbia, which she still attends “every now and then.” Her most organic pull to music started with her mother, a bossa nova singer who had her own band. Haynes believes her otherworldly draw to the Brazilian music staple comes from before she was born. “Every time I hear ‘Girl from Ipanema’ I know I’ve heard that in the womb,” she says. She praises the song’s ease and pull. Before the Seratones, the exuberance and un-containability of joyful noise inspired her; whereas now, she tries to find the ease of sound in whichever way the body happens to be in a given day, which is mentally hard but is what she deems bossa nova embodies. “I grew up on flower-child music for a good chunk of my childhood, which explains a lot,” laughs Haynes, referring to the amount of doo-wop music she would listen to when living with her mother. Her favorite song at the time, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds speaks to her precocious nature that only exacerbated as she matured.

Singing in church while growing up was a form of coming of age for Haynes. At the time, Kirk Franklin and new gospel started to peak in influence. She experienced the old hymns and old spirituals alongside the new R&B, allowing her to notice the sundry ways that gospel could reach people. “People talk about churches like they are monoliths, and they are not. I think really cool churches create a safe space for people,” says Haynes, especially in black history, when churches were pivotal to social change. They are a place for people to have fellowship and to exchange ideas, she emphasizes, also adding, “What is part of me and my experience in the church is that communion. The communion of sound and a willing audience. But also a tough one.” Because the church she practiced in had no sound amplification, she learned to use her voice as a way to reach the back wall without a microphone. “That’s what is the most powerful thing of being in a church. It’s not the church itself, but it’s the sound. It’s the people in it. It’s that dialogue of that exchange of sound,” she says.

In high school, Haynes began appreciating jazz and got into into jazz vocalists, like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day and Sarah Vaughan. Developing a fine-tuned ear meant she grew distinct and precise tastes. For instance, she loves Etta James, but she values James more for doing Jazz standards: “She’s got such a powerful of-the-earth voice, so to hear her exercise a lot of restraint is really the sexiest thing to me.” That jazz is no longer en vogue frightens her. She recognizes that at a deeply human level, the role of a singer is to tell a story. “There’s subtlety, there’s phrasing that you can really bend a word and wrap it around meaning. Something that Billie Holiday did exceptionally well,” she explains. Haynes, unquestionably, narratively sings, which is probably why she didn’t make it into the center when she participated in choir. In high school, she sang in the New Dimensions Choir based out of St. Paul’s Methodist Church. Her choir director’s instructions sometimes ring in her inner monologues: “You need to watch your breathing here.” Admitting she didn’t have the voice for choir, she credits the experience with giving her the structure that allowed her to have a better understanding of what her voice is capable of, which some argue is whatever she wants to make it. She sings from her feet, she says, as if to say that her voice comes from her roots.

Voice only couldn’t satiate her musical desires. She picked up the guitar at eighteen, seeing it as the means to an end, a song writing tool that she could use to communicate ideas to other people. Presently, she’s having a reignited infatuation with the guitar. “Now I get it. Now I can start to understand how the voice and the guitar can move together,” she says. She innately always attempts to find a melody, comparing the process to having a metal detector always chasing valuable relics. Sometimes a melody is something she just stumbles upon, “like treasure on a beach,” but usually, “you have to get your metal detector out.” Either way, Haynes fills up rooms with sound. It’s the kind of thing she makes you feel, before you hear it. Vocally and instrumentally, she subverts sound without any obligation to parameters. When it comes to her music, something is always at the cusp of happening, most likely provoked by an appreciation for far-reaching musical legacies.

“So much of all of our music is a cultural exchange,” she says in regards to her time as World Music Director at KSCL 91.3 Shreveport. It allowed her to have an extensive lexicon from which to create a story: “Our experiences are sometimes bigger than what we’ve been born into.” When we don’t have the tools for expression, borrowing and weaving from other contexts becomes a necessity. “Let’s get a Latin beat, put some fuzz on it, and the story is a retelling of David and Bathsheba, but the woman gets to win,” says Haynes off the cuff, referring to some of her composing process. Casually, she’ll name drop obscure music artists like Robi Draco Rosa from Puerto Rico and Los York’s from Peru. Her music knowledge is as impressive as her poise, each particular and mindful.

Though a formidable performer, Haynes values the sweat-based work that happens behind the curtain. “People think they want success, but they don’t want to see the sausage factory of success. For me that’s the most fascinating part,” she says, commenting on the process as being more tangible than the result. The magic on stage is only possible because of the grueling labor behind the scenes, which makes the performance more meaningful. She believes that music performances are about remaining present and living in the moment of sound exchange: “A moment is there, then it’s gone.” She takes cues from artists like Sam Cooke, who would have a pristine studio version of his tracks, but then after hearing his Live at Harlem Square you’re left asking: “What just happened?” It’s her job and goal to play around with time and space, something a smartphone will never capture, so she prefers memories to pixels. “There is a world that comes together in each song. And I’m able to interpret those in different ways. I definitely go into a trance state,” says Haynes.

The band is currently working on their second LP, which is a major shift from their first album Get Gone (2016), described as “raw energy-driven punk sounds and soul, with an occasional jazz swing.” The new album concerns itself with the creation of intimate spaces. Intentionally veering from her usually powerful vocals, she strives to capture the sound of singing in someone’s ear. She explores her power as a woman and what that means in each track, finding it empowering to play with her own power. It’s a form of living with the pent-up rage of time and experience, all while telling her story in an unapologetically honest way. “This record is about soul power,” she says, “It’s not always the showy singing that pulls what the story is,” which refers to the restraint she found so powerful in jazz vocalists.

AJ Haynes’ cool, calm demeanor definitely has a lot of bite. The teeth come out in her passion for keeping her songs alive by finding new ways to interpret them on stage. It can be heard with each strum of her guitar and each powerful vocal belt. It can be felt in her profound fixed stare. One track at a time, Haynes creates a little bit of mystery, intrigue and danger that contains the capacity to reach the back wall of any space she occupies—a space that starts with earth and ends in the ether.

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