THE MOTHERLAND REMEMBERS
Music. Legacy. Style. Reinvention.
And the treasures waiting on the other side of fear.
Welcome to the september edition of The Modern Muse.
From the Editor:
WHAT IF I HAD LET FEAR WIN?
In my 60s, I’ve been thinking a lot about fear.
There was a time when I genuinely wondered whether I should return to the music industry. I had been away for 18 years. Coming back meant starting over in many ways, and there were moments when fear got the best of me.
But somewhere along the journey, something shifted.
I stopped approaching my career from a place of power, what I could accomplish, what I could prove, where I could get, and started approaching it from love.
And love changed everything.
When you move from love, the smallest things become gifts. Every person who shows up. Every opportunity. Every song somebody remembers. Every person who tells you what your music meant during a chapter of their life.
You begin to understand that maybe this was never entirely about you.
This year, Africa stretched me.
I had been to Africa before, but this time I went farther, Kenya, Sun City, Botswana, Mozambique. New places. New audiences. New experiences.
And then I arrived in Mozambique.
There was a welcome waiting for me that I could never have imagined, a parade, city officials, young traditional performers, news cameras, and people who had carried my music with them for decades.
I remember thinking:
What if I had let fear convince me not to come back to music?
I would have missed this.
I would have missed this treasure.
My daughter Ashley was beside me for this journey, which made it even more meaningful.
I left the music business when she was very young, so there was a whole part of my life she didn’t really experience firsthand. During an interview we did together, she said something that made me laugh: “I didn’t know my mama was Beyoncé.” 😂
What she meant was that she was seeing, maybe for the first time, the scale of what the music had meant internationally, people knowing the songs, singing them back, remembering moments from decades ago.
That was special for both of us.
She interviewed me about Ritual of Love, and I loved having that conversation with her because it connected the woman I was then to the woman I am now.
