How Candice Hoyes Is Preserving Black History And Beauty With New Album ‘Expecting’

“I started writing a few years back,” vocalist and composer Candice Hoyes tells ESSENCE. “It was a really challenging time for me.” Unconstrained by genre, Hoyes’ high soprano voice reaches from classical and jazz to opera and house. Yet, at the time, she was struggling to find a seat at the table. 

Not because she was seeking out one, but because her range requires her to drift across rooms, taking up space with multiple seats. “Once that metaphor was in my vision, I started exploring sound archives,” she says. Flipping through archives at the Library of Congress, she stubbled across a sample of writer and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston’s work. In the sample, her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston described the feeling of the moon following her at night. 

Then, it all clicked. “That was why I started making my solo album,” Hoyes says. Her first-ever solo album, Expecting, released just days ago, embodies the poetic grandeur of her music born out of track one: “Zora’s Moon.” “Expecting is so much about the unexpected of life,” she says. “It has some literal roots for me as well.” The name of Hoyes’ album, for example, is after a track in Minnie Ripperton’s 1970 album, Come to my Garden. Growing up listening to her parents play that record, “the song ‘Expecting’ is a song I’ve never heard anyone perform,” she says. 

Which is why, in her solo album, “my purpose is to activate these archives in my own way and do them live so people can reach out, touch these songs, and connect them to the present and the future.” The preservation of Black historic sound lives through Hoyes’ 13-track album, which features contemporaries like Junius Paul, Casey Benjamin, and Makayla McCraven to help keep classics alive. 

But, the album isn’t just about others’ legacy. “At the time, I was told by my doctor that I couldn’t have children,” she says, while working on the album. “I was expecting that I would be able to because I had already had a child and this was my second time.” Dealing with infertility, she grieved the possibility of not being able to conceive what her spirit felt ready for. Then, just two months later, she became pregnant naturally as the one in 1,000 chance. “It definitely inspired me to not only finished writing the album, but to get in the studio and start recording throughout the pregnancy,” she exclaimed. 

Almost ten years in the making, Expecting has been a revelatory process, documenting her personal life along with the work of writers like Maya Angelou, Roberta Flack, and even her 103-year-old grandmother. Born to Jamaican parents, her family’s archive was just as much of a reference in writing her album, specifically for track 11 named after her maternal grandmother, “Winnifred’s Barrel.” 

“The barrel is a reference to barrel children, the generation of children whose parents are from the Diaspora and send home different goods and resources in these barrels,” she says. Writing her way inward, “there’s so many layers to the sacrifice and the pain and the emotion and yearning inside those barrels.” The depth of emotion captured throughout the tracks is one inevitably spilled onto the album cover. Since the album was composed using the same equipment (manufactured in the 1970s-‘80s) as D’Angelo’s Black Messiah album, the cover was strictly analog. 

Using lettering separated by cogs, a barcode with Kingston coordinates, and beauty evoking Donna Summer and Diahann Carroll, “we were directly engaging with the Black feminine divine,” she says. It’s the same type of natural beauty she finds in everyday life, from coffee dates and classic music videos to gazing out the window and feeling the beach’s salt water on her feet. 

“I want [my album] to be more absorbed than listened to,” she says. Now, with her album out, she’s finding time to be present with the sounds before going live. Slowing down, “I want to make sure I’m slowed down enough to feel the album come out, and like a little seedling, feel people, see the roots grow down, and to feel all of that,” she says. ““I want to feel everything.”

Credits:

Creative directed by Akili King

Hair by Andrita Renee

Garments by Diotima and vintage by artist

Makeup Ernest Robinson

Images by Courtney Yates