Shaped by music and activism, Toshi Reagon reflects on her upbringing and remarkable career writing, playing, singing, and producing music.
Shaped by music and activism, Toshi Reagon reflects on her upbringing and remarkable career writing, playing, singing, and producing music.
Debbie Millman:
Folk, blues, gospel, rock, funk, Toshi Reagon writes it, plays it, sings it, and produces it all. Her genre spanning work includes an opera, the Parable of the Sower, based on the dystopian novel by Octavia Butler. She’s been making albums since 1990, and her commitment to social justice rings loud and clear in her songs, and in her beautiful, expressive, and powerful voice. She’s here today to talk about her life, her music, and her career. Toshi Reagon, welcome to Design Matters.
Toshi Reagon:
Ah, thank you for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Toshi, I understand that the first big rock concert you attended was when you were 13, and it was to see the band KISS. So were you a big fan of their music?
Toshi Reagon:
Oh, obviously, I really loved KISS when I was a kid, and I still soft spot for them now. But they’re a very exciting band for young folks or for anybody, but they are very committed to their sound and very committed to the theatrics of the characters they were playing. I started playing drums like really young, and so they were like a fun band, I could put on headphones and play along. And later in life, when I was hanging out with Lenny, Lenny Kravitz, he’s a huge fan of KISS as well, so we both got to go see them together. And then, because he’s really famous, I got to meet everybody. So that was a big highlight to meet them, finally.
Debbie Millman:
I have a confession to make, KISS was also my first rock concert as well, Nassau Coliseum, 1977. I was about 14 or 15. You saw them at the old Capital Centre in DC, right?
Toshi Reagon:
That’s right. In the back, I was on the wall, the highest place you could go, and then I touched the wall. I was in the last seat.
Debbie Millman:
You’re a little bit younger than me, so I think we probably sort of discovered them and fell in love with them about the same time.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Toshi your parents were active in the civil rights movement as you were growing up, which is sort of an understatement, but, nevertheless, your mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, founded the Grammy award winning, all women, all African American ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, in 1973. Your father Cordell Reagon was a leader in the civil rights movement in Georgia, and co-founder of the Freedom Singers. And you’ve said your mom’s value system of resistance was already set in motion by the time she started college, and was working as the NAACP youth secretary. When was yours set in motion, given how you were raised?
Toshi Reagon:
I was really primarily raised by my mom, but it was very beautiful and active community. We lived in this house in Atlanta, and on the top floor was Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Harding, two, I think sometimes we say, civil rights activists, and then we miss a whole bunch of what people do. And the civil rights era, which comes out of the Southern Freedom Movement are specific things that we know about, but these people are just casting such a wide net vision and leadership. And, now, I know they were very young in their lives, like early 20s, and so it’s kind of extraordinary.
Toshi Reagon:
So I was like really shaped by activism, when I was three, two, four, because all of the that were around me were, and that was what they all talked about and how they raised us. They were not going to like send us some place to go to school where we could be attacked for being black. So they were very, very specific in how they were raising their children. And we really understood that.
Debbie Millman:
You are folk music, legend Pete Seeger’s goddaughter. You were named after Pete’s wife of 70 years, Toshi Seeger. Your mother often performed with Pete, were you close with the entire family?
Toshi Reagon:
I mean, Pete and Toshi, I was close to, but I always like to say, “Pete Seeger was married to Toshi,” and I’m like, “And he’s Toshi’s husband,” and Toshi is a phenomenal, expansive, amazing, incredible woman. I don’t know if Pete would’ve been able to be folk legend Pete Seeger without her. And she really is the one that pulled together this idea of the Freedom Singers traveling across the country. It was my mom and Toshi who communicated, in order to get them around the country. And that idea that you can do anything yourself that you need to, I really get very strongly from my mom and Toshi. And from Pete, I get what songs can do, and how songs can pull people together.
Debbie Millman:
Despite declaring at four years old that you wanted some Jimi Hendrix albums, you’ve stated that your real goal in life was to be the first black woman in the men’s National Football League.
Toshi Reagon:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide you wanted to do that?
Toshi Reagon:
I mean, I really love football. Football’s like, it’s so much fun, and it’s such a great outlet for adrenaline. Now, of course, once you start throwing on pads and really hitting each other, it’s quite a dangerous game. And I never got that far, before I had a hip accident playing sports, but I did at one point get to play with some guys that were much bigger than me, high school guys. And we would have these like big games on the field of Coolidge High School. They weren’t like with pads or anything, but they were tackle games, and they would have first downs and things like that. And this is my big moment of football is that I gained a first down in that game.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Toshi Reagon:
And I got hit.
Debbie Millman:
That’s impressive.
Toshi Reagon:
It was very impressive. I got hit by like 16 year olds. I think I was probably 11, and I got hit by like 16-year-old guys. And I was like, “What the fuck?” It hurt really bad, but I got up. And then I was like, “Yeah, I’m okay. I’m okay.” But definitely by… I don’t know, I see some women really joining the teams now, and I think it’s great. But I I’ve been boycotting the NFL for like eight years, because they’re just a hot mess. That’s a sport that could transform the cities that they’re in.
Debbie Millman:
You mentioned a serious hip injury. You didn’t get that injury from football, you got that from softball, is that correct?
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I got that on softball.
Debbie Millman:
So you were just a general all-around athlete.
Toshi Reagon:
I love sports. I still, to this day, love, love sports. I think that it’s… Yeah, I love it.
Debbie Millman:
It wasn’t until that hip injury that you began to reconsider your future goals, and I believe that’s when you picked up the guitar.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. It’s kind of a mush of things. In our family, you sing, so I was musical. If you go to my grandma’s in Georgia, everybody sings and people sing out church culture. So was not like you separated you’re singing from anything in your life. So I started singing when I was three years old. I never did not sing in my entire life, but I was like, “I’m going to be a football player,” but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to do music.
Toshi Reagon:
And Rosie Lee Hooks gave me a guitar, probably, when I was about 10, so I already had a guitar. But I think when it was like, “You can’t run,” I was like, “My focus is going to be music.” And then that’s when all of the things started to come together.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you chose guitar, specifically, because your best friend, Daniel Lopez wanted to learn how to play.
Toshi Reagon:
He’s going to love this. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you practice together every night over the phone-
Toshi Reagon:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
… so much so that your mother bought you your own phone.
Toshi Reagon:
Yes, she did.
Debbie Millman:
Why were you practicing over the phone and not in person?
Toshi Reagon:
Well, he lived in Virginia and I lived in DC, and the school we both went to Burgundy Farm Country day School was in Virginia. So, yeah, I would ride out there, but after school we both went home, and then as soon as we got home, I’d run up to my room and then we’d be like teaching each other, how to play Neil Young songs like string by string. It was awesome. It was one of the best things I ever did in my life.
Debbie Millman:
Despite learning how to play guitar with Daniel Lopez, you hijacked your brother’s drum set-
Toshi Reagon:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
… and would repeatedly play along with the LaBelle album Nightbirds.
Toshi Reagon:
Yes, I did.
Debbie Millman:
And then I understand you moved on to conga, and then songwriting. So talk about when you first started writing songs, how you started to write songs. I find songwriting to be one of the most mysterious, magical entities that exists.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I mean, I think, I always had songs in my head. When you’re young, you make up songs all the time. Kids are always like, “Da, da, da, da, da, da.” But I think because music was our love and communication language in my family, there was no singing that wasn’t taken seriously. My cousin [Kabanya 00:10:08], when she was two, we all banged on the piano, but all of a sudden when she was two, we were like, “Wait a minute, that makes a little bit of sense, what she’s doing.” And Kabanya is like an incredible singer and pianist. But when she was two, she was taken seriously, her voice was taken seriously. My voice was taken seriously, the second I like said any words. And I think that made like the idea that I could write songs very seamless.
Toshi Reagon:
It wasn’t like, “I have written a song.” It just was like one day I’m writing a song, and it was taken seriously. This is before we had all of these portable devices where you could like record yourself. So I rigged up two cassette machines and I would do like, multi-track recording, which sounds crazy, on these two cassette machines, and my mom would listen to it and then she would critique it, “Why does it sound bad?” And I’m like, “Because I don’t have the technology. I have to go into a regular recording studio.” And then she started taking me to the studio with her. So songwriting in itself, I don’t know that it’s so far away from anybody. And then when you do it as somebody like take your voice seriously, and it’s the same thing as anything one would do.
Debbie Millman:
Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah, I wrote this song when I was first teaching myself guitar called, I love you. And it’s like the simplest thing you could play on the guitar. And the simplest melody you could play on the guitar, and you could sing. And it just was some basic lyrics about, “I’m going to hold you tight, because I love you,” or something like that. I was like 12 or 13. I got a little bit more better at it, as time went on.
Debbie Millman:
And I believe you started your first band when you were in high school, it was a cover band, right? You played Led Zeppelin-
Toshi Reagon:
Yep.
Debbie Millman:
… Neil Young, the Beatles. Did you play KISS?
Toshi Reagon:
Nobody liked KISS as much as I did, so we did not play KISS songs.
Debbie Millman:
I’m surprised, I think you guys could have at least played Beth, that’s sort of a crowd pleaser.
Toshi Reagon:
No, that wasn’t my favorite song. I like, I Stole Your Love and all of the… To this day, I try not to make people play things they don’t want to play.
Debbie Millman:
And you were the drummer, not the guitarist, at that point.
Toshi Reagon:
I played a lot of different things. So you know how it is in school is like, three or four drummers, three or four guitarist, three or four this, so sometimes I played drums and sometimes I played guitar and sometimes I just sang it. This just was whoever was around.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you also learned how to play the bass, because your bass player didn’t show up for a gig.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. We had the flakiest bass player, Les [Hazar 00:13:01] and he would just like, not show up for things. And so, yeah, that made me have to play the bass, which is one of my favorite instruments now, so I thank him for not showing up. But, yeah, and a few times on gigs, a bass player has not shown up, and I’ve been like, “Okay, I’ll play.”
Debbie Millman:
So it just comes naturally to you. Did you ever take formal lessons in any instrument or vocal lessons?
Toshi Reagon:
The instruments when I was seven, my mom tried to get me to play guitar and I hated it. I don’t know if it’s that the teacher was bad or that I just didn’t like that idea of learning. It didn’t make sense to me. So the guitar, I really learned on my own, in collaboration with Danny and other people. And June Millington is one of my musical moms and definitely, if she has a guitar protege, I’m probably her first one. And the people that I play with, I was very inspired by. And voice lessons, I definitely had to take voice lessons. My mom made me as soon as she saw me like singing in bands. She’s like, “You have to take lessons,” and it’s not so much like singing lessons, but it’s like, how to use the instrument of the voice.
Toshi Reagon:
She saw I was going to tear my voice up. And so we had, the biggest fight, me and my mom ever had, was over me taking voice lessons, which I hated. Then I did exactly what she said I was going to do, I injured my vocal chords. I couldn’t talk for six weeks, and then I learned to listen to my mom-
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Toshi Reagon:
… when she says, “Go to voice lessons.”
Debbie Millman:
Why did you hate it so much? Was it the formality of it? The rigidity-
Toshi Reagon:
It’s not… It wasn’t… It just really clashed with my 14-year-old self. It is very formal, and singing isn’t a whole body experience. I think like a lot of us have access to singing, and we don’t ever think about like my whole body is singing. We’re just thinking about our voice and how we feel when we sing. Like so many things that we, it’s the entirety of a universe of systems in your body that create what is your voice, what it is that you do. It came so easy to me, I just couldn’t imagine at 14 that there was any way for it to leave me or that I could do something wrong.
Toshi Reagon:
Now, when I work with vocalists and their grownups, a lot of vocalists still don’t have that understanding. And so, they’ll say, “I get really tired in my throat,” or, “My shoulders hurt,” or, “My lower back hurts.” And it’s like their body trying to figure out how to make the sound that they wanted to make, but they’re not activating the systems, the physical systems. At some point, you have to learn how to use that, or you will not have your voice. Your voice will quit.
Toshi Reagon:
And Pete Seeger’s a great example of this. Like Pete is classic. Pete position is, his neck is stretched out, and he’s singing and he is looking up, and that lasted for a long time. And then one year he couldn’t make a sustained sound, and people will see his grandson Tao started touring with him to do the singing, because Pete could talk, but he couldn’t sustain notes. And then, miraculously, I don’t know, some few years later he started to be able to sing a little bit, again, which probably was representative of a lot of rest.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. Y’all singers out there, find somebody, not a singing teacher, a voice teacher that will actually incorporate the wholeness of your body into your singing. And don’t do like I did, unless you want like a six week silent meditation, which people are really into now.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, actually, I was going to say, I know a lot of people that pay a lot of money for that. Toshi, you’ve said you have three musical moms. Your mom is first, and you consider her the queen. And then two others, Nona Hendryx, who achieved success both as a solo artist and as part of the band LaBelle, and June Millington, a Filipino American guitarist, songwriter, producer, educator, and actress, who also co-founded the Institute of American Arts. And I was wondering if you can talk about how all three of your musical moms influenced you.
Toshi Reagon:
Wow. We might need another episode on this.
Debbie Millman:
That’s cool.
Toshi Reagon:
It’s pretty deep. I really think about my mom that we have traveled together before this lifetime, and in this lifetime, we are mom and daughter that this is part of one of our journeys. When people ask me what they should do with their kids, I know they’re asking me about music, and like how expose them to music. And I think what my mom did was like, it’s the above of grace unlimited. I know when her parents saw me, when I was a baby, I was the representation of their incredible efforts to exist.
Toshi Reagon:
These black people on both sides of my family, navigating the violent, racist institution of the United States of America on both sides of my family. Understanding the preciousness and the miraculous gift of life, and coming up through the time of our ancestors, when they had to live through generation after generation after generation of ownership of their bodies and anything their bodies created, including life. And to the unimaginable acts of watching somebody either take you away from your kids or take your kids away from you, to understand the multitude of systems that you put in place to house yourself and house your people, when people think you are criminalized, the second you come up with unique idea of being free.
Toshi Reagon:
For those people to get to the year 1964, and see the first generation of our family that’s not going to pick cotton, it’s such a big deal. It’s such a big thing, is I don’t even have the expansiveness of language to cover it. And every single person looked at me like I was a reason for every single thing they have ever done in their lives to get to that moment. And, my mom, I’m the first child, I’m the first grandchild on my mom’s side of the family. But my mom just took me everywhere. There was no place that I couldn’t go with her. And I think if there was a place I couldn’t go, she would maybe think she was going to the wrong place. And she just joined me to who she was. And then when my brother came, she just joined him as well.
Toshi Reagon:
And I think that the sound of our people, a lot of people make this line, like, when is art important? When do you need art? And what is the position of the artists? And it’s, what is the position of people? When are the people’s voices important? When do the people use their voices for this? What is the technology of sound? What is the technology of sonic holding resolution of home, when people tell you, you don’t have one?
Toshi Reagon:
That’s where I come from. I almost say, before I’m an artist, I’m a person who has to survive in this wicked world, and the instrument I use is my voice and song. And then, oh, there’s an entity called art, and oh, it can be commercialized. And oh, I could make a living. This is all after that. But my mom brought me into the world and set the standard for how people should look at me and receive me.
Toshi Reagon:
She and my family, let me know that that was important to pay attention to. You shouldn’t just blow that away. You should know, like, no, they really looked at you like you didn’t belong here, and now you get to make a decision, if you want to stay. And now you know what you need to do, if you want to stay. To be born and have people communicate that to you is a good thing.
Toshi Reagon:
And that’s why I got these other two amazing moms, because they kind of come from each in their own way, a similar line. June Millington is the first woman I saw play electric guitar and use effects pedals. So my mom told me that day when my hip broke and I couldn’t be a football player, and I said, “I’m going to be a musician.” My mom said, and you probably researched this already that, “Well, learn how to be a producer and stay away from drugs.”
Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that specifically.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. So I ended up being an intern at Roadwork, which was like an all women’s production and booking agency started by Amy Horowitz. So I worked on all of the concerts, and Chris Williamson was doing like a concert at Constitution Hall. It was really bananas, because that was like a big hall, 3000 people I think, and it was just filled with lesbians. It was like-
Debbie Millman:
A total fantasy.
Toshi Reagon:
… it was amazing. Yeah. It was like so many lesbians. And then June was the guitar, she had produced Chris’s record. I, basically, followed her everywhere. And then she doesn’t know why, she said that, just when she met me, she said, she saw me walk into the room, I was a kid, and she was like, “Okay, that person’s mine.” And then from that moment on June started to teach me. So the next day I went to where she was staying, and she did one of her songs, and she wrote me out a chart, and I couldn’t really read charts. But June Wilmington’s charts are very beautiful and classic, and you can understand them, and she taught at me how to play the song in a guitar.
Toshi Reagon:
And then after that she would send me cassettes of everything she did. I would get a cassette in the mail. And I like to say, “I’m her first student.” Now they have the Rock ‘n’ Roll girls camp and all of these things. She would send me how she made records, how she wrote songs.
Toshi Reagon:
And then Nona, Nona was like the first woman, other than my mom or women in Sweet Honey, that I identified, that when you looked at the back of a record, the song was written by them. And LaBelle was such a big band, and then when we got the record, I saw like songs written by Nona Hendryx. And I can’t tell you what that meant to me. It was so important. When you looked on the back of Motown records, it was so many songs that just said the corporation, the corporation, the corporation. And then every once in a while, it’d say Ashford & Simpson or Stevie Wonder.
Toshi Reagon:
But it was like the… And I’d be like, “Who’s the corporation? What does that mean?” In LaBelle records, you had the name, and then it would say Nona Hendryx. So I always wanted to meet Nona Hendryx, when I was a kid. She had one of my favorite voices and she wrote the best music, the most interesting, journeying music, complicated, complex, meaningful lyrics and situations. And so when I had a record deal with Electra, the best thing that came out of that deal, because a record never got released, was Nona Hendryx.
Toshi Reagon:
They were like, “Is there any producer you want to work with that’s already successful?” They want names. And I was like, “I want to work with Nona Hendryx.” And they got her. The first time I was in a meeting with Nona Hendryx, I levitate. And from that moment on, Nona has been like a beautiful guiding light, and also just an expert in songwriting. And she produced, one time, a vocal track for me. And just that like couple of hours of working with her really, really influenced how I produce myself and produce my vocals.
Toshi Reagon:
So the three of them, it’s a pretty heavy team. And I feel really grateful. And out of all of them, there’s one thing, when my mom told me to be a producer, her idea was that, I had to be able to present myself, because I didn’t have time to wait for people to decide. You can do it. And Nona, because she had had a lot of experience in the business, Nona was the person who was like, “These people are not your friends,” and to take every opportunity like its ingredients, but know what it is that you want to make. And then pick the ingredients you need and leave the rest. And June was the person who was like, “There is a system to recording sound and recording sound very well, take your time and learn the systems that please you and make you happy.” And all of those significant, really significant systems help to create, along with my own intentions, what I do.
Debbie Millman:
In addition to your mom saying that you needed to stay away from drugs and learn to be a producer, she also said, as you were becoming a musician and started to play with her, that she was going to treat you like everyone else. And you had to show up, and if you sucked, she didn’t want to work with you. Were you ever worried you couldn’t-
Toshi Reagon:
Well, she never actually said that, but she just did it. There would never be like, she won’t work with me, that would never happen. But when you’re little and you go to work with your parents, you get to see them in action. And so I would go to work with my mom and I would see her doing the DC Black Repertory company song workshops, and then creating things. I grew up in that atmosphere. So once I started doing it, I was shocked, but she treated me exactly the same. And she had the same expectations. And she doesn’t give you a lot of preparation. She doesn’t explain anything to you, she’s just like… As I got older and she started having me work with her, which like kind of, started when I was 16 and she saw I started having talent in the studio, and I started producing things.
Toshi Reagon:
The score for Africans in America, that’s mostly like a lot, the two of us, she did not tell me what we were doing. She didn’t say, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to work on a score. We’re going to do this, and we’re doing that. And it’s four different films, with four different directors, and we’re doing the da, da, da.” I just showed up one day in the studio, and she put a microphone across from her. And then she did like this, which meant, sing what I sing. And then I did not know the song. I did not know the words. I did not know anything. And I just started singing what I would hear in her mouth. And as soon as I got it, she switched lines. And that’s how we did the vocals for almost that entire project. If you go listen to Africans in America, you’d be very impressed with us.
Toshi Reagon:
But with me, because she never said, “Hey, this is what I want you to do.” She was like, “Ah, I think it’d be a great idea, if you did Still Away on electric guitar. Here, I’ll sing the line, I think.” And then I would play it on a guitar, and, “Oh, what if you harmonized it?” And she did it. So more comes out of that congregational singing that I think she grew up with, which is like, nobody ever taught you a song. You learned the song from being a part of the singing, and that’s how she did me. And that’s how she does everybody.
Toshi Reagon:
Even with the Freedom Singers, after my father died, they had a show and they asked me to do my dad’s parts. Nobody taught me what his parts were. I was just sitting there like, “Isn’t somebody going to tell me?” And they just started singing, and I was just like, ah, ah, ah, trying to figure it out. And when I messed up, they didn’t go back over the song and correct me, they went on to the next song.
Debbie Millman:
Has this influenced the way you manage your own sets. I understand that when you’re performing, you don’t ever have a set list. So you just write down 30 to 40 songs you’re feeling good about and then see what the energy is like. So-
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… it seems like that might have influenced the way you perform now.
Toshi Reagon:
It totally did it. It came from my dad, with the Freedom Singers never programming a set. Then my mother, with Sweet Honey, never programming a set. And then me, with Big Lovely, never programming set. And honestly COVID has forced me to program the sets, because we don’t rehearse, really, or we have very little rehearsal to limit the amount of time that we were together, if we were doing something. And a few of the things we did on video, we had no rehearsal, so I had to say, “Okay, we’re going to do these songs,” so people could practice on their own. So I have to do it. I look forward to being able to get back to that though.
Debbie Millman:
In 1983, after saving up for studio time, your mother booked you in a studio to record a cassette of songs called demonstrations. And I have tried to find that everywhere, I have not been able to find it. How would you describe that music today?
Toshi Reagon:
Oh, I’ll send you one, it’s on cassette. I mean, it’s a young Toshi, first time being in a studio. She didn’t come with me. She was like, “Here you go,” and she dropped me off. Thank God for June Millington, because I knew a little bit about what I was supposed to do, because… But it’s a young me. It’s some of my first songs, and I think it’s pretty cool. It’s the only recording of my friend Curtis McShane who I went to high school with. He’s a really good guitar player, and he passed away very young. That’s how I remember, how important it is to record, and how important it is to like put down your ideas, and leave them behind for other people to find and hold onto, eventually.
Toshi Reagon:
So it got made into like hundreds of cassettes and then the company that was distributing them closed down. They sent back like the last 50 of them, so I should transfer them and put that out.
Debbie Millman:
Yes you should.
Toshi Reagon:
It’s [crosstalk 00:32:50].
Debbie Millman:
You should. Your first official album was titled Justice, which was published by Flying Fish Records in 1990. How did you first get that record deal?
Toshi Reagon:
I mean, it’s not as hard… I mean, I think I’m sure I got it because Flying Fish put out Sweet Honey records, and they didn’t have to pay for it, I paid for it. So I think that’s how it happened. And now I think another label has it, and I’m like, “Give me back my record, that I paid for a long time ago.” But I love Justice. Justice is one of my favorite songs, and by then I was like covering the Police song, Walking in Your Footsteps. I like a lot of the music on that record, and I’m glad that it’s still accessible. And it’s also amount of time I went on tour with Lenny, his first world tour.
Debbie Millman:
Well, how did you first meet? Yeah, can’t just drop that, when I went on tour with Lenny. Yeah. You and Lenny are very close, but you were a fan of the Cosby Show growing up. And had a premonition that you and Lisa Bonet, and then by extension and her, then husband Lenny Kravitz, would end up being friends, and that premonition ended up coming true. How did you first meet them?
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. And I want to be really clear, because people hear this story and I’m so surprised, I must have said it somewhere, but, yeah. So I did, I was looking at The Cosby show like everybody, and it hit me, I was looking at it, and I was like, “We’re going to be best friends. It’s going to be like my sister,” and everybody laughed at me. Because at that time everybody wanted to be best friends, and everybody wanted Lisa to be their best friends. But-
Debbie Millman:
Don’t they still? Don’t they still?
Toshi Reagon:
They still do. Lilakoi Moon is one of the best people who ever hit the Earth, so I think everybody would love to be friends with her. But it happened because they were making a big video in Central Park for Lenny’s first record, Let Love Rule, and my friend was friends with the stylist for the video. Everybody was like starting out at everything. So Arianne Phillips and my friend and Lisa Taggar, and they were like, “You want to watch it?” Because making videos was a big deal back in the day. And so we were just watching, and then at some point Lilakoi was like, “Can you go over and dance in the video, because I like your hat,” or something like that. And so I was like, “Okay,” and then was just like being an extra in a video. And then later they invited me to come to their house, at some point, and they were serious.
Toshi Reagon:
That was the beginning. And then Lenny said that thing, like, a lot of people say to you in your life, like, “When I go on tour, I’ll call you up and you can come open some shows.” And he really did. I got to open like five shows in Calgary and Portland and these different places. And then he was like, “I don’t want anybody else to open for me, because the vibe is really cool. So you open the rest of these shows.” And I don’t even know if my Justice record was out, but I didn’t have… People paid big money to open shows at that point, so another band had already paid. And so he would put me on in between that band and him, so that band would play, and I would go in and sing three songs, and nobody ever knew I was coming.
Toshi Reagon:
It was a good break in to playing before people, and them not expecting you. And so I went to Europe with him a couple of times and did a bigger tour with him in the States. And then he took off into like the stratosphere. And we are a spiritually close family, but Lilakoi is really my sister for life. And then later Zoe came along, and everything is everything. It was such a really beautiful and generous opportunity, and came with, I think, a lot of love and a lot of organic feelings. And so I’ve always appreciated that particular time. But I make people take it off of my bio now, because I’m like, “It was 30 years ago, let’s stop.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was part of your origin story.
Toshi Reagon:
It was part of the beginning, for sure. For sure, for sure.
Debbie Millman:
By the time the tour was finished, a bidding war erupted in both Europe and the United States for your next album, and you signed with Electra. And when you signed with them, your mother told you, “The only way it wouldn’t work out was if you couldn’t sing, when you stepped out of it.” And you did indeed step out of it, you left Electra after the label, didn’t release any of your material. I’m wondering if premonitions seem to run in your family, because of her saying that to you, that’s my first question about it. And then my second is, what happened?
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah, she says, “The only failure you’ll ever having is if you don’t do your art, if you don’t do what you’re you’re supposed to do.” Well, I don’t know. The music business is really weird, and it’s really weird for different reasons, in different eras of time. And it is structured, at that time, off of the economy of exploitation and ownership. Certain things have to happen in order for it to be worth it for a company. And it also had a lot of wealth. This is kind of right when the label started to shift… A&R departments used to be very musical, A&R people used to be somebody who had musical backgrounds. And then at certain point A&R people, started to be like lawyers and administrators, and people who like to go to shows, and it was easy to spend 300,000, $400,000 on somebody. And then be like, “Eh, I don’t like this record. Let’s dump it.”
Toshi Reagon:
Most of the artists on a planet that record music or anything like that, to this day, most of us live in a middle or lower old situation. And that is not valued as success. So that if you are like, waking up in the morning as a musician and you’re paying your bills, that’s not seen as success. What’s seen as success is, if you are such a dominant force that you generate hundreds of millions of dollars. And so I think it was very easy for people to see that something wasn’t going to get there. And at that time, records were failures if they sold 25,000 copies or 50,000 copies, or even a 100,000 copies, and now people would be like, “You sold 50,000 copies.”
Toshi Reagon:
That’s how much the buying of a record has deteriorated. The monetization of music has deteriorated. And it’s not because the money isn’t there, it’s just somebody else is taking it. So the whole business is just not built that, if you are a person who records a song, you sell copies of the song, and then most of the money comes to you. It’s just not designed that way. And now, streaming is just like, you record a song and people listen to it whenever they want. And maybe they know it’s you and maybe they don’t. And like somebody sends you half of a penny and that’s it.
Debbie Millman:
Going back to what you were talking about before, about seeing Nona Hendryx’s name on the album, that couldn’t happen anymore, only because 45 people write a song. I mean, it’s unbelievable today to… I mean, thinking about the way you write music, it’s music and lyrics by Toshi Reagon, music and lyrics by Joni Mitchell music and lyrics by Pete Seeger. Now it’s by committee. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary. I can’t even understand how it’s possible to have 45 people in a room making a song, especially if that is supposed be representative of living.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah, I mean-
Debbie Millman:
It doesn’t make sense to me.
Toshi Reagon:
That technology doesn’t bother me as much as that, no matter what happens with that song, it’s still going to be like inside of the economy of streaming. Because the economy of streaming is like, it’s free to listen to and it’s not. Somebody is making money and somebody is broadcasting it, and that is not free. If you have 45 people on a song and each time this song is played, it generates income, then that’s your decision to split it between 45 people. That’s one point.
Toshi Reagon:
But the other point is the technology kind of leads you there. And in some ways that 45 people is correct. If you are using sampling as part of a base of your song, and you like sample Nona Hendryx and Count Basie and somebody else, and you made like a big fat loop, then you should pay them.
Toshi Reagon:
The other part is that thing I’m saying about like, in order for it to be successful, it needs to reach a stratosphere. And so I think that has made people go, “Okay, let’s set up a writing room, and let’s pull…” Somebody wrote something in that room. Somebody wrote something in that room. Somebody wrote something in that room. You have to pay everybody. And you’ll hear people break down songs, and they’ll say, “Well, this song, we just use this from this song,” and it’s a small thing, but you still have to pay the person. So I don’t know that that’s bad, as much as it rep presents the technology that we have available for us to collaborate.
Toshi Reagon:
And then the understanding that people understand they should be paid for what they do, even if it’s nothing. Which back in the day, people didn’t necessarily know. So a lot of black people sold songs for very little money, because they didn’t understand publishing. And now every kid understands publishing, every kid understand… No, I want to, let’s make the sheet right here in this session, so we don’t have to fight later in court.” All of the kids understand that, which is wonderful.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you for helping me understand that better, because I’ve always been really perplexed by why there are so many names in the production credits.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. Everybody got to put their hand on it.
Debbie Millman:
Yep. You’ve recorded, I think, 12 albums. You also teach music workshops. You’ve composed pieces for dance companies, arranged the music and performed on global tours for The Temptation of St Anthony, a show based on the writing of Gustave Flaubert. You found it and ran the Word*Rock* & Sword Festival. You’ve worked with the legendary Robert Wilson on Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter. Your career is so large and expressive and impressive. Congratulations on being able to do your work in your own way as a truly independent artist.
Toshi Reagon:
Wow. Thank you. I’m really grateful for the way that people laid a path for me, and the way people said the path that I was making, even though it wasn’t conventional, was good. I’m really grateful that I was seen by so many people as being important and of value. I’m grateful to my community and my friends, who I have grown up with, who are all like pretty amazing. And my best friend, Jacqueline Wilson, who we grew up together, and we met because we were dating same girl, shout out to Liza McAllister, yo. That’s our homie. We’re all-
Debbie Millman:
It’s a good thing I already know that story, otherwise, I’d make you tell it on the air.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. No. But Jackie and I have like really watched out for each other and it really is something to get to a certain point in your life and realize you’ve been doing things for a really long time. I started playing guitar when I was 14, and I was like, “I’ve been playing guitar for over 40 years, that’s bananas to me.” And spiritually, I just really feel like I’m five years old. So I just don’t even understand the way to time works.
Debbie Millman:
I totally, I feel the exact same way.
Toshi Reagon:
Oh, thank goodness. Okay.
Debbie Millman:
I really so. I feel-
Toshi Reagon:
We need to-
Debbie Millman:
… the exact same way.
Toshi Reagon:
… go hang out sometime, and meditate on that, because… But I’m really grateful. I’m grateful for my life. I’m grateful for the journey, and even the journey of not being able to run around and be a football player, and to constantly deal with the original injury of my hip, and just what it means to be a human being in this time.
Toshi Reagon:
I’m super grateful to my family and my ancestors and the Reagons and the Johnsons, and then all of the family that I’ve made. I couldn’t do anything without them. And my family and my daughter and everybody, it’s a wonderful thing to wake up in the morning and just feel good about who you are and where you are and who you’re with.
Debbie Millman:
I couldn’t let you go without talking a bit about the Parable of the Sower, which is a major, major creative masterpiece. And this came from, originally, this work, this opera that you’ve created, really started, had it seeds at Princeton University when you were teaching there. And I believe that you and your mom were co-teaching at the invitation of Tony Morrison. Was she a close friend of your family?
Toshi Reagon:
She was a close friend of my mom’s and she asked mom to do it. And mom was like, “I can’t do all of the classes. Well, Maybe Toshi will teach half of them.” I don’t know why my mom said that, but I’m really glad she did. And then she’s like, “Can you come and teach half of these classes?” And I was like, “Yeah.” I went to high school and I didn’t go to college, and all my friends who I went to high school that went to college, were just like, “You’re teaching at Princeton, really?” And I was like, “Yeah.” Oh, yeah. And now I’m on campuses all the time with my little high school diploma. It feels so good.
Debbie Millman:
It’s awesome. It’s awesome.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. I love school. So we needed a text, we were teaching mostly acapella music, Southwest Georgia, from where my mom’s from, and then a little bit of contemporary black music. And my mom picked Parable of the Sower as the text. And we both were already Octavia Butler fans, but that was the book that I just refused to read until that class. Because that first-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, really?
Toshi Reagon:
… page…Yeah. Yeah. I started it, I was like, “Uh-huh (negative).” I’d already read a bunch of her books, and I was like, “I’m not reading this.” I knew I would get to it eventually, but it just felt like it was going to be very scary, and I was already-
Debbie Millman:
But for my listeners that might not be aware of the book Octavia Butler first published Parable of the Sower in 1993, and in the book, she writes about a fictional dystopian future set in 2024. And she writes about an immoral and ignorant leadership, a planet ruined by climate change and corporate and political greed. She writes about wealth inequality, shortages of water, housing and healthcare, terrifying, religious raced-based violence. Speaking of premonitions, it’s almost like she wrote 2021 for us. It kind of makes Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale feel like a children’s book. What made you decide to choose that specific book?
Toshi Reagon:
Well, what we were doing in that class, wasn’t like trying to write theater. We just thought that would be a good text to sing conditions that have existed before. And it would give us the opportunity to access music that we all already knew and had. And each of us wrote a song based on a book in that class. But even when we did that, we weren’t like, “Oh, now we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t until it was over that, I was like, “Can’t we sing this book.” And that’s when we started to like investigate with Octavia, could we like do something? And she was like, “Yeah, y’all can do something.”
Toshi Reagon:
And then mom got very busy and then some years went by, but we still wanted to do it, and I saw her when she was doing a book tour for Fledgling, and she was like, “Oh, I owe you and your mom some paperwork.” And she was like, “Just do whatever you want with my work. It’s okay.” And I was like, “No.” I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, we need them papers.” Oh my goodness. Bless her heart. And then she passed away the next year. So we never got it that way. But a couple years later, New York City Opera, we thought we might do it there. And then New York City Opera closed for a little bit or went down and canceled most of that season when we would’ve done it.
Toshi Reagon:
So my mom was like, “I’m good.” And I was like, “I’m going to still do it.” And then when she retired in 2014, we went and did the libretto and everything. We finished as much as we could. And then she retired in 2014, and she’s like, “I’m really retiring.” I snuck some of the songs we had written into a show, and John [inaudible 00:51:28] and Meiyin Wang, who were participating in Under the Radar Festival at The Public, were like, “What are those songs?” And I told them, and then they were on it. The next thing I knew I was sitting in the office, [Maralee’s 00:51:43] office, and I was like, “Can I try to do this again?” And she was like, “Okay.”
Toshi Reagon:
And she gave me a year to try to figure some things out. And then if I figured that out, she gave me another year to do something else. And so that period of time really showed us like that it was possible, and a team of people came together. But I insisted that we started in 2017, which was very short amount of time of development, and you really should take five years or so. I don’t know, do what you want.
Debbie Millman:
Well-
Toshi Reagon:
But it did-
Debbie Millman:
… it’s premier, the world premiere, at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2017. So you made that goal happen.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. And I thought it was important. I really understood, I don’t know if this is happened to you, where you understand that, technically, something might be better if you take longer time, but that in terms of meeting the moment, like you need to-
Debbie Millman:
Momentum.
Toshi Reagon:
… get… Yeah. And so I would was like-
Debbie Millman:
Totally.
Toshi Reagon:
… “We have to do it in 2017, because her timeline is 2024, this next level things, I think she’s been really accurate, and the way I use the work is to build a path around the work of activism or creativity, or just even simply people seeing each other, and beyond the borders and beyond the rhetoric, and actually like really focus on our common conditions, no matter who we are. And I felt like I would want to hit 2020, ’21 with five years of that already in place. That’s what I’ve done with the work, and that the actual participating, coming to a theater, and seeing the show, goes back to the way that you would sit around and witness something that you all already know.
Debbie Millman:
The show has been described as a congregational opera. And you talked before about congregational singing. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what congregational opera means.
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. Most of the music is sung by the cast, the whole entire cast. There are some solo moments, there’s some duets, there’s some trios, but you almost never don’t see a community of people activating on a stage, or you won’t hear a community of people activating sonically. And that feels really important to us. Most of our shows are very congregational. Everybody does our shows, they’re like, “Well, am I lead? Am I this? Am I that?” And I’m like, “Your part of a group.” And they’re like, “But am I going to sing?” I’m like, “You’re going to sing all the time. You’re always going to be singing.” And Parable’s no different, but it’s probably the one where this idea of communicating sonically, is the way to really talk about very, very hard things.
Toshi Reagon:
And you do that simultaneous thing that our ancestors did, which is, if you are in any way, sonically producing the conditions of your life, then you are in a state of testimony, and you are in a state of claiming and declaring. And whether or not anybody understands the language or what your song might mean, that you are even making sound, it doesn’t even have to be the text. The text can be on the inside of your heart, and the inside of your voice, but that you are creating an opportunity of home inside yourself.
Toshi Reagon:
And so the most difficult moments that this story takes you through, unfortunately, resonate with the reality of what many people face on the planet today. And the ability to actually be honest with yourself and believe what yourself is telling you, is a major opportunity to strike back at these conditions.
Toshi Reagon:
But in the future of Parable, the talents, when one of the characters are asked, during in the 2030s, “Why did we have to go through such a horrendous time?” And this character says, “Well, I think somewhere in the 2015s, ’14s, ’15s, we let it happen.” It’s not as flippant as it sounds, “We let it happen.” It speaks to the way of this particular world and this particular time, which can have you activating every single day. You’re working. You’re participating socially. You’re going out. You’re online. You’re turning your outrage to your people. And you’re not actually shifting the dynamics of the harmful conditions that exist. And if you are, it’s taking too long. And so this story ask you almost to take that foundation that you might already have, that instinct you already have, and if you’re sitting there going, “Should this happen sooner? Should I do something faster? Should I make more of a…”
Toshi Reagon:
When you’re in your house, and around you there is something destructive, there’s one way you move. And when you’re in your house and the destructive thing is happening in your house, there’s another way you move. And should we be like, actually it’s happening in our houses right now, and be moving that way. And that’s, I think, what Octavia is trying to instigate with this story, is that by the time it’s actually in your house, you’re a little late. You’re a little late. And she’s saying, “You’re not going to be in control of when it hits your house. But if you acted like it was in your house, when you feel like you’re in control of your house, you could probably do something there.”
Toshi Reagon:
That’s what we trying to do. We trying to be like in your town, in your city, in your block, there are people activating. Do you know who they are? Do you know who you live next door to? Do your kids know how to walk from your house to somebody else’s house? Do you all have ways of transportation that don’t require you to be on the internet? It’s such basic things that you would want to like ask yourself now, not because the huge, gigantic disaster is going to happen, but because every day, some little disasters are happening that take away the access you think you have right now to things that you need to exist. And you want to get fluent with how you actually exist in those conditions.
Toshi Reagon:
And you might even choose one day to be like, “You know what? We not going to be on these internets today. We not going to be tracked by these cookies today. We’re going to make an intentional decision to meet in a park and turn our shit off, because it’s important to unplug from these systems as a political statement.” I’m not saying everybody has to do that. I’m just saying that, if you start to give yourself other ways of communicating, other ways of seeing each other, and to base these ways, and the practicality of nature and kindness, which is not the same as like liking people, but in kindness will give opportunity for transformation. This is what I have learned from these books.
Debbie Millman:
Given the success of the recent stage production of Fire Up in My Bones at the Met Opera, the first ever opera written, directed, and performed entirely by people of color, do you hope to bring the show to Lincoln Center or even to Broadway? It seems like a 2024 launch of this show would be apropos.
Toshi Reagon:
I mean, I would love to bring it to Lincoln Center. I think that would be awesome. And the way I think about it too, is like, well, wherever it’s housed, how many places could it touch in New York? Because I think that would be really cool, I mean, it’s a West Coast story. And I’m always like, “There’s some little things about, and this happened in New York and New Jersey, and this and that.” But I really would love to have a real New York happening around the story, because the story’s about conditions. So it doesn’t matter if it’s specific necessarily to everything, although the last one we did was in LA, but it’s adaptable to wherever people are. So I would love that. I would love that a lot. That would be awesome.
Debbie Millman:
I think that we have to make this happen 2024. Toshi I have one last question for you, it’s actually rather lighthearted. It’s something I discovered in my research in preparation for today’s show that I was really surprised by, so I want to ask you about it. Is it true you collect flashlights?
Toshi Reagon:
Wow. You dug deep. I love flashlights. Yes, I do.
Debbie Millman:
So what’s that about?
Toshi Reagon:
Yeah. Light, obviously, light. I love light. Well, even before Parable, I kind of felt like I should have things with me in situations. And so I always have a book. I always have pen and paper. I always have a recording device. I always have water. I always have something I can eat. I always have a flashlight.
Debbie Millman:
You must have a heavy bag.
Toshi Reagon:
I don’t know. I carry a backpack, but I always to use them. And then I bought flashlights, and then I just like, see an interesting one, I get it. And then my mother-in-law, Marlene, she gives me a new flashlight, so she’s actually really responsible for this. She gives me a new flashlight for Christmas every year, and she has found so many forms of light, it’s pretty amazing. They’re always different. They’re always pretty interesting. And now it’s a thing between us, so for the last, I don’t know how long, she’s been giving all these cool flashlights.
Toshi Reagon:
And then I think, there’s this song, let your little light shine, maybe someone down in the valley trying to get home, and that’s one of my favorite songs. And so that idea of shining a light, it makes me feel warm inside. And then, there’s been many times when the lights turn off and I have had my flashlight, and lead myself out of a dark place.
Debbie Millman:
Toshi Reagon, thank you for shining a light on the world with your music and your work. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Toshi Reagon:
Thank you for having me, and everybody take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.
Debbie Millman:
You can find out more about Toshi Reagon, hear some of her music and find out what she’s up to on her website, toshiregan.com. This is the 17th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman. And I look forward to talking with you again soon.