Music that Made Moyana Olivia
Moyana Olivia is a songwriter and Musicology student at Northwestern University studying how Black artists engender social change, restoration, and transformation through music. Moyana’s musical influences include R&B, soul, pop, and folk music by Black artists like Rihanna, Ms. Lauryn Hill, and Nat King Cole.
In this blog series, we post playlists co-curated by Keepsake House artists that include their greatest influences, childhood favorites, and even guilty pleasures… the Music that Made them.
It was Moyana’s idea to produce a Keepsake House show that included a round of cover songs and stories to inform a discussion on Black appropriation versus appreciation. That show—Sankofa—is finally happening this Thursday, August 17, and we thought it was the perfect time to begin a blog series on musical influences.
Moyana is the youngest of the 2023 Artists in Residence at Keepsake House, but their musical influences reach well beyond Moyana’s years thanks to both familial education and intentional research.
The first portion of the Music that Made Moyana Olivia sits firmly in the realm of pop, beginning with their own latest collaborative single with RHOME, “Next to Me,” to introduce listeners to Moyana’s signature powerhouse vocals. Early influences Rihanna and En Vogue come next, songs that Moyana says were some of the first for which they learned all the lyrics and belted out in the car with their mom.
“Falling” is next, the first single Moyana ever released on Spotify, with an opening line that splinters: “This hurts more than it should.” The song is a piano ballad with layered vocal harmonies, completely unlike the influence it is paired with—Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind - Live”—yet the two are similar in their raw vulnerability. The latter was released on the day Moyana was born and is a song they turn to to recenter, because “Everyday’s another chance / To get it right this time.”
Moyana’s “Smile” and Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” are declarative love songs, and it’s worth sharing the reason Cole is included here. “My dad sang this song to me and my sister when we were babies,” said Moyana. “He recorded a version of himself singing it onto a CD and set the player in our crib when we were little to help us fall asleep.”
Prince was not included in Moyana’s submission of influences, but it would feel wrong to exclude Moyana’s masterful live cover of “Purple Rain” here, which leads into the softer, contemplative portion of the playlist. Folk musician and social activist Toshi Reagon’s cover of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” may be the sleeper stunner of all these influences. It turns a ‘70s pop hit into an acoustic romance brimming with the kind of cautious gratitude for new love that may only be understood by a queer perspective. Moyana discovered the song in the 1996 Cheryl Dunye film “The Watermelon Woman,” a seminal work about being Black and queer made by a Black lesbian filmmaker. The world is made that much smaller and more magical when you learn that Moyana’s fellow Keepsake resident, Valarie Walker, played Tamara in the film.
One of the things we at Keepsake House have always admired about Moyana is the way they advocate for their Black community. Moyana is currently working on a resource guide for performing Black music and champions the voices of fellow Black women being a part of their residency show, Sankofa. “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley & The Wailers must be one of many classics that have informed Moyana’s growth in activism. You can read Moyana’s resource guide and support them and fellow Black women—including the aforementioned Valarie Walker—by purchasing a ticket to Sankofa, coming live to New York and online this Thursday, August 17.
The final pair of songs that made Moyana are their own “Missing You” and “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye” by Boyz II Men, two R&B songs that show just how illustrative a strong vocal line and simple bass line can be to tell stories of loss and longing. Moyana’s father taught them the Boyz II Men song and sang it to them in the hallway of their college dorm when he dropped them off for freshman year, and Moyana’s “Missing You” ends with the lyric, “Midnight / Streetlights / Trying to see through all the rain / All alone / Stereo / Playing the song we used to sing.” See Moyana perform their own songs as well as the songs they used to sing this Thursday and follow their career here.
