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The Feminine Voice As An Energy Which is Soft, Yielding, Nurturing & Nourishing: A Playlist Dedication

Fifty-five tracks assembled around a quality rather than a genre. The title is a thesis, and the music mostly supports it.

A dedication, and a premise worth examining

The framing here — the feminine voice as an energy that is soft, yielding, nurturing and nourishing — comes out of a familiar way of thinking about gender as complementary energies, with roots in Taoist yin and yang and in various strands of contemporary spiritual practice.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a contested framework. Associating softness and nurture specifically with femininity has a long history of being used to narrow what women are permitted to be, and a number of the artists on this playlist have spent their careers refusing exactly that association. Solange, H.E.R. and Amber Mark are not soft or yielding in any useful sense; they are precise, controlled and frequently furious.

What the selection actually demonstrates is something more interesting than its title: that restraint is a technique rather than a temperament, and that the singers here choose it deliberately.

What to listen for

Sade's "Clean Heart" is the model everything else orbits — a voice used at half its available power, and considerably more forceful for it.

Lianne La Havas's "Good Goodbye" is the best vocal here. She is a superb guitarist as well as a singer, and the harmonic choices are hers.

Solange's "Stay Flo" is the one that most argues with the premise — it is rhythmically assertive and structurally strange, and it belongs on any list about vocal control.

Sona Jobarteh's "Reflections" brings the kora in, and she broke a seven-hundred-year male inheritance to play it.

Sevana's "Carry You" is the Jamaican entry, Mpho Sebina's "No Evil" the Botswanan one, and Yuna's "Lullabies" brings Malaysia in.

Amber Mark's "Heart-Shaped Box" is the Nirvana cover and the single least yielding thing on the playlist.

Duffy's "Stepping Stone" and Maysa's "Love Is A Battlefield" are the deep cuts.

Go deeper

Lianne La Havas's self-titled 2020 album is the one to hear whole — including a Radiohead cover that is better than the original.

Solange's A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home are two of the most formally ambitious albums of the last decade.

And for the framework itself, if it interests you: the Taoist sources are considerably subtler than the popular version, and worth reading directly rather than through the wellness literature.

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