Solange is never bound to one single method of expression. That’s why, after releasing her new album When I Get Home on March 1st, she put out the record’s self-directed companion film later that same day. Shot largely in Texas, the 33-minute clip builds on the album’s vision of Houston as a space boundless in black spirituality. Solange practices mudras inside of the city’s famed Rothko Chapel. Images of black cowboys are juxtaposed with ancient Egyptian iconography. And in one segment set to “Dreams,” a woman stands on her lawn watching the family across the street cycle through various stages of life—sometimes playing, sometimes mourning. Eventually the woman turns into a shrub with a festering human hand.

That surreal scene was written and directed by Terence Nance, the Dallas-born, Brooklyn-based auteur behind HBO’s “Random Acts of Flyness,” a sketch comedy show that explores black American identities through a dark, Dadaist lens. Most recently, Nance was tapped by LeBron James and Black Panther’s Ryan Coogler to direct the long-awaited Space Jam sequel. And besides directing videos for artists like Solange, Earl Sweatshirt, and Nick Hakim, Nance is also a musician in his own right.

Solange and Nance first met after being cast by Barry Jenkins to star in an Afrofuturist film called Wonderland, where they would play a husband and wife duo sent back to 1972 via a time-travel device powered by Stevie Wonder jams. Although Wonderland was intended as the follow-up to Jenkins’ 2008 debut feature Medicine for Melancholy, the film got scrapped—but could still happen, according to Nance. Solange and Nance stayed in touch, and last summer the two found themselves both gravitating toward similar aspects of Eastern religion. After Nance asked Solange to contribute music to “Random Acts of Flyness,” she played a stripped down jazz set in the season one finale, notably singing the word “onyx” over and over again. Along the way, Solange sent Nance snippets of what would become When I Get Home.



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Calling from Los Angeles, where he’s working on pre-production for Space Jam 2, Nance spoke with Pitchfork about Solange’s “superpowers” and so much more.

Pitchfork: How did Solange enlist you to work on this film?

Terence Nance: We were doing musical elements for the show and I reached out to her to see if she wanted to do something. She sent me some songs—I would call them more like meditations—that really related to what I was thinking about terms of repetition. Like, mantras that you design for yourself, that signal to dogma that are self-created and individual. Around the time we were talking about that, she started playing me what she was working on. I think it was related to some of what she had [composed for the show]. I was taken aback and surprised, in a great way, with where she was going. And she was like, “You want to work on this film?” I’m from Dallas and for a little bit had lived in Houston’s Third Ward [where Solange grew up], so we have a lot of the same reference points—that same familiarity.

What kind of visual story did you want to tell when you heard “Dreams”?

I didn’t have one song in my purview when I was writing. Solange and I had conversations about violence, [posing questions] like, “Is violence always bad? Is there violence that is justified in the service of protection—and protecting who, protecting what? What are like the remnants of violence on a body that would feel like armor, feel like something you could you be proud of, but also would not want to be there?” Because “Things I Imagined” and “Dreams” were in my head at the same time, I was thinking of it more like a younger child’s perspective. And Solange was like, “Nah, I kind of thought of this as more like an adult thing.” It came out as a larger conversation about what the whole [film] could be.

How did you find the Third Ward neighborhood where you shot your part?

I was looking at places, but nothing was giving me that feeling of familiarity. So I asked the [location scouts] to find the place where I used to live. It was crazy, because that house was for sale, and I thought maybe we could we could shoot there. But it was better to shoot around the corner, because we had to find two houses across the street from each other that were both cool with it.

Location seems really important in When I Get Home. What role do you think it plays in the film, in Solange’s eyes?

I think that part of Solange’s superpower is activating space, seeing it differently than you get to see it. A whole part of the film [set to “Down with the Clique”] was shot in front of Dallas City Hall. That's the place that I saw so much growing up. It’s a huge building that has a really dramatic 45 degree angle like it’s going to fall on you—this sort of intentional feeling of, it has power over you because it’s City Hall. But in the way that she activates it, she changes it a little bit. It’s nighttime, she’s in all black, and there are a lot of people in all black. It made [the building] feel more in service of her and us. If you look at her set design and what she’s doing as a sculptor, it’s definitely about sacredness and space-making for black people and black women.



You’re a musician yourself. Do you think that helps when you’re making videos for folks like Solange and Earl?

It helps because I know what it’s like to churn out a song from your innards. [Laughs] In my experience, [music] is more intimate—more singular than a film, which is impossible to make alone. It’s more of a minefield emotionally when other people are brought into the process, especially with anything that represents the music, like a video.

Last year, in a Saint Heron interview, you said, “The hat I happen to have on when viewing from a capitalistic context seems like a lot of hats, but it’s really just one hat.” What did you mean by that?

I didn’t grow up thinking like “I’m this” or “I’m that” [in terms of creativity]. I was introduced to that idea when I got into a school environment that was trying to train me to make money. I went to art school, which is like a person in a room talking shit. So I learned how to talk shit.

The first jobs I had in film were making music for TV shows, opening theme songs and bumpers. Then I’d compose music for my friends’ short films. Then I would design posters and obviously, I was editing and animating and doing all that stuff. But I didn’t have a business card that said all those things. I was just like, trying to survive.