Super Empty’s Song of the Week is co-published every Friday by the INDY and Super Empty.
Any time a North Carolina hip-hop act releases a song with a nationally renowned guest feature like Amelia Meath of electro-pop duo Sylvan Esso, it’s going to be noteworthy.
Throw in production work from Phil Cook of Megafaun, even more so. Unless, of course, that act is Durham-based rapper Shirlette Ammons, whose kaleidoscopic, maximally collaborative approach to music has, over the past ten-plus years, begun to render these kinds of Avengers-esque team-up moments as little more than just another day at the office.
Whether or not it’s an out-of-the-ordinary affair for her, Ammon’s irrepressibly upbeat new song “Hello“—which also serves as the second single from her forthcoming fourth studio album, Spectacles (out April 26th, Puddin Pie Productions)—is nonetheless a treat for the rest of us, a tribute to community and creative partnership from a veteran artist with more authority to speak on the subject than just about anyone.
More than just Durham’s consummate musical collaborator, Ammons has built a career as a creative force in general: poet, documentarian, film producer, and curator, to name a few.
In recent years, she’s served as a producer on the award-winning music documentaries Stay Prayed Up (2021) and May The Lord Watch: The Little Brother Story (2023), worked as a performing arts curator at Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center, and been an inaugural member of The Rosetta Circle, a social justice-minded music residency at Duke’s Rubenstein Arts Center, alongside Tift Merritt, Rissi Palmer, and others. More than any one technical talent, her superpower has consistently been to pull together the disparate artists, creatives, and visionaries—herself included—needed to bring ideas and concepts to life.
While that trend seems likely to continue on Spectacles—the production credits list 13 other featured performers on the album, more collaborators than there are songs—so too does Ammons’ penchant, as seen on previous albums Language Barrier and Twilight for Gladys Bentley, for hard-to-categorize, genre-resistant music.
Whereas the album’s first single, “Short,” indulged in a fusion of rap and eerie blues-rock that wouldn’t have felt out of place on Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love!, “Hello,” leans almost entirely in the opposite direction, into feel-good pop/rap crossover in the vein of Common and Lily Allen’s “Drivin’ Me Wild.” All the requisite parts of the form are there: the catchy, bouncing acoustic piano chords, the swirling synths, the lilting hook, and ultimately the bars, delivered in Ammons’ emphatic but unhurried Southern drawl.
Written years ago at the height of social distancing and quarantines, Ammons describes the song as a “pandemic anthem,” intended as a “check in on loved ones and a recognition of the isolation we were all feeling.”
While Meath’s hook conveys that spirit fairly directly (“I see you every day, from far away… are you alright?”), Ammons’ rhymes are more roundabout, grounded in the kind of reminiscing that often comes alongside loneliness in any form, whether pandemic-related or not: “I’m hungry for that feelin’ that came from crate diggin’/ Freestyles and slick disses, vinyl scratched without skippin’/ Studios in folks’ kitchens, so Southern, it’s playalistic…”.
As the track arrives at its finale, a significantly less-heralded, but no less important, collaborator joins in on the chorus: a group of kids from Durham’s Central Park School for Children. Echoing Meath, they offer the same affirming words we’ve heard earlier (“No worries… It’ll be alright”), but in a new, refreshing light.
It feels, considering Ammons’ background as a producer/collaborator extraordinaire, like the musical arrangement sensibilities of a master. Who better to check in on us during these profoundly weird times than those who have known hardly anything else, and have turned out alright anyway?
It’s a small detail, but Ammons’ and Cook’s instinct to call in the younger reinforcements is the right one. On “Hello,” there’s plenty of optimism and reassurance to go around—mostly by adults—but the words of the youth may be the most comforting of all.
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