First Impressions: A Pleasure to Have in Class by Nia Wyn

Sometimes a snippet of a proffered song or album flows from my iPhone mini’s embedded speaker and instead of the usual smushed sound it’s as if I’m sitting in the sweet spot of an esteemed concert hall—aka 10th row, center. When I close my eyes, I visualize the singer and band weaving collective magic from their perches on stage; they cast a succession of spells via infectious melodies, sinewy rhythms, and distinctive vocals wrapped around oft-poetic lyrics about life, love and more. 

Such happened to me Friday morning, while juggling—as always—one too many tasks. Retro-soul artist Nia Wyn’s forthcoming A Pleasure to Have in Class landed in my in-box and instead of losing my place on my laptop, where open windows upon open windows often leave me lost, I listened via the phone. I expected, as is often the case, to dismiss it within a minute or two. (Yes, I can be that cruel.) Instead, I heard echoes of Duffy, whose “Rockferry” long ago melded with my soul via the $10 headphones I used at TV GUIDE while mining my interviews of celebrities and behind-the-scenes folks for quotes.

Not wanting to interrupt the flow, I played the album from start to finish, marveling at the full-bodied sound emanating from my phone’s thin speakers, then again while out and about with Diane, this time via the Mazda3 Time Machine’s Bose sound system. Echoes of Duffy abound. Amy Winehouse, too. Just as Ella Thompson, MT Jones, Jalen Ngonda, Durand Jones & the Indications, Thee Sacred Souls, Stone Foundation and so many more lean on distant rhythms and rhymes to make sense of (and find comfort from) modern life, so too does Ms. Wyn.

In her case, that means coming to terms with a childhood spent in a small North Wales town, where she shuffled in and out of mental health care due to undiagnosed autism—a common fate for girls and women, sad to say, as the condition often presents differently in them than in boys and men. (That it took decades for doctors to realize that fact speaks to the sexism long embedded in the medical profession.) Add in other issues she faced, including isolation, questions about identity, and substance abuse, and one has the recipe for something grand…or not. Polemics set to snappy beats tend not to resonate longer than the length of the songs, after all. Here, however, the songs embody the experiences themselves; we step into her shoes and experience life through her eyes. That they’re mostly funky marvels that move and groove with slinky grace make them that much better. Think Philly soul, the Memphis sound, and Motown updated for the modern age—that’s A Pleasure to Have in Class.

The first lines of “Start Again” should resonate with most everyone who’s felt like an outcast in school—i.e. almost all of us: “It’s so hard to be told you’re too much/When you’re so scared of your soul being crushed/Sometimes I catch myself trying make the room laugh/Cos I was once the joke that they laughed at in class.” Where drink and drugs once lessened the pain, now it’s something better (and healthier): love, sweet love. “Bring the Rain” conjures the Supremes at their uptempo best—and, too, Duffy’s breakthrough hit, “Mercy.” It’s an incisive commentary about so-called “moral crusaders” who routinely other the trans community: “They say trouble follows/No matter where she goes/And yet it’s you right behind her/Stalking her right to her home.” 

“Paranoid,” on the other hand, slows the tempo; it articulates how the suspicions we sometimes shield ourselves behind are rarely warranted, while the tongue-in-cheek “Your Team” finds her tired of come-ons from men. The title track embraces a Temptations-like shuffle, while lyrically she looks back at how she retreated into herself as a child: “Now they always told me I should be myself/But little old me I had to protect myself/learning the hard way, I locked up that door/Promised myself I wouldn’t get hurt no more/But now I’m grown, what if I’ve lost the key?” 

Syncopated beats turn “Loves Me Not” into a finger-snapping lament. “Nothing Good (Ever Comes From Dreaming),” meanwhile, is reminiscent of both Amy Winehouse and the Ronettes; it explores the existential questions posed by the subconscious mind: “I had my tarot cards read/Each one spelt out death/Maybe it’s a threat or a warning/A sickness inside me/You don’t know the trouble I’ve seen/All before I’ve opened my eyes.” “Happy Anniversary,” for its part, gets to the heart of the matter with a stark depiction of the struggles to maintain a sober life.

“It’s My Business,” which features the Harlem Gospel Travelers, uses the incomprehensible murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey to call for the respect and protection that queer and trans people should have and expect as a matter of course. (FYI, othering people is how politicos distract the populace from the real issues holding us back.) The soul-baring “Blue Grey Eyes,” which closes the album, could well be a long-lost county classic, though in fact it’s a track Wyn held back for 10 years.

The concluding lines of A.E. Stallings’ poem “The Fear of Happiness,” in which she expounds upon her fear of heights, seems apropos to the reactionary zeal too many have embraced: “But it isn’t the unfathomable fall/That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,/It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.” It’s an apt metaphor, I think, with too many so-called leaders creating the very calamities they speak against. Straight, gay, trans, white, black or Asian (and anyone I may have missed)—to believe the worst in any is to believe the worst in all. Which is to say, A Pleasure to Have in Class is a delicious slice of retro-soul. The beats are guaranteed to have you tapping your feet, if not dancing around the room, while the lyrics are sure to make you think.