It’s one of those warm fall days that are more precious because they’re almost gone, and Keenan Jenkins has driven out to Saxapahaw from Durham for coffee on the balcony of Cup 22. In the outdoor amphitheater below, alongside the Haw River, some children on a school outing are holding up colorful handmade posters while parents applaud and lift phones, and sunlight smooths over everything like a gentle hand.
Jenkins—the singer, songwriter, and ace guitarist of XOXOK—is tall, slender, and fine-featured, with a tiny gold stud in his nose. Today he’s wearing a fitted black T-shirt, and a thin gold chain flashes around his neck. Unburdened by a pendant or jewel, it hangs in an easy circle, its weight evenly distributed.
This minute detail takes on outsize significance in the context of Jesus Piece, XOXOK’s long-awaited debut LP, which follows 2019’s Worthy EP and a string of brilliant singles. The album is seamed with spoken-word interludes where Jenkins, over twinkling cocktail piano, portrays a freshly signed musician who goes shopping for the titular status symbol and winds up wearing a blond-haired, blue-eyed millstone.
There’s something distinctly old-school about the album, and it’s not just the skits. It’s the cover art, complete with the iconic parental advisory label, where Jenkins swoons in a torrent of crimson gauze under a dramatic embossed font, like DMX meets The Sorrows of Young Werther. It’s also the lushness of the music, the leanness of the rhythms, the flowingly braided melisma of the singing, the cover of Erykah Badu’s “Didn’t Cha Know.”
It often wouldn’t be out of place on the Foxy 107 radio he grew up with in the ’90s, and it has a cooking band, including keyboardist Gabriel Reynolds, bassist TJ Richardson, and drummer Joe MacPhail. Though Jenkins’s early music was a hair more Radiohead, Jesus Piece represents his full embrace of live R&B and soul.
“My previous work, a lot of it was me sitting alone in my room thinking what cool guitar thing I could do,” he says. “I started playing with other people and I started appreciating how the guitar does not need to be prominent all the time, how less is more, how space is king. I can still do a tiny flashy guitar thing and bury it; I’ll know it’s there.”
As for specific inspirations, he’s quick to rattle off Solange, Moses Sumney, Maxwell, and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” “But he was like, What’s going on in the world?” Jenkins says. “And I was like, What’s going on in my head?”
It’s not a surprising question for someone who studied social psychology at UNC to ask. This background detail becomes most relevant in “Right On,” the meditation on police violence and privilege that first put XOXOK on the INDY’s radar. “Just ’cause I’ve got a PhD don’t mean they won’t—” Jenkins sings, pausing, and the music holds its breath; then his lone guitar scampers across the silence and his voice goes phosphorescent: “Light me right on up.”
Later, on the liquidly gleaming title track, the skit story turns inward as metaphor and takes flight in song, a frame in which Jenkins can metabolize his own evolving relationship with external and internalized racism.
It’s the only track that couldn’t pass for a regretful love ballad, and it’s a clue for us to hear the others for what they are: measurements of space between white culture and Black experience, exorcisms of misogynoir, mills to separate guilt from shame, thank-yous and apologies and crucibles of growth.
“Famous artists have the luxury of not talking about what their songs are about,” Jenkins says. “Me and millions of people are going to listen to it and get on Genius and annotate it. But I like it when a musician tells me what their songs are about. I could just say this album is about forgiveness, and that would be fine, but I spent a lot of my life thinking I was very enigmatic and mysterious; ‘stoic’ was the word I loved. I’m trying to move differently and be a more vulnerable person now.”
“I’ve been trying to discover / Just why I’ve chosen my lovers” are the first words Jenkins sings on the album, on “Spell,” a pellucid elixir of gospel and jazz. Quiet fireworks rise behind the long cursive script of his voice, his guitar working like a soft knife.
Growing up, before moving on to the NC School of Science and Mathematics and UNC-Chapel Hill, he was one of few Black kids in his classes in Rocky Mount, and his concept of beauty came from MTV: the blond hair, the blue eyes.
“I think that western beauty standards really fucked me up,” he says. “I looked back at my dating life and was like, OK, white, white, white, not Black, white.”
“Spell” is part of a duo of engrossing songs featuring harpist Cassie Watson Francillon, the other being “Come Around.” If the first is about rooting out internalized racism, the second is about apologizing for it—to someone in particular, and to Black women in general. “The idea, not cognizant but subconscious, that whiteness is better somehow—I’m saying I’m sorry I took so long to come around,” he says.
Blackness is vast—I always felt that on the inside, but I had never really seen it on the outside.”
The gorgeously candlelit “On Game” actually is a love song … to podcasters. Specifically, the Black podcasters that Jenkins credits for his awakening. The Read, Another Round, Code Switch—they were the first critical looks at race he encountered as an adult.
They gave substance and sustenance to the feeling he’d had since reading Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? as a teenager, the book seeming to hint at something vital about the past 16 years, and the past couple of hundred.
“The media narrowly portrayed Blackness as this one thing, and they helped me understand the value of Blackness,” Jenkins says. “That Blackness is vast—I always felt that on the inside, but I had never really seen it on the outside.”
His Erykah Badu cover is about the difference between forgiving yourself and letting yourself off the hook. “I’ve come to this fork in the road with this new understanding,” he says, “and I could take the easy route and not challenge myself to do better, or I could take the hard route, take accountability, and feel shitty about myself for a long time but also hopefully come out the other side a better person.”
The climactic, conclusive “Higher Standards” is that other side, and despite all of this hard learning, Jesus Piece has a buoyant, beautiful, celebratory sound. You might not perceive its thornier themes without the skits, and we all know that skits are made to be skipped. That’s why Jenkins weaves them into live performances, like his upcoming album release show at NorthStar Church of the Arts on November 10, with Tre. Charles.
“It always happens the same way,” he muses. “People hear the first part of the skit—Oh, I signed a record deal—and they start clapping. They’re really excited for me, right? And I’m being very serious. And next they’re like, He wants to buy a chain? OK, whatever. By the time I get to the end, about them wanting you to think that blue eyes and blond hair looks best, the people in the audience get it.”
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