Exclusive Preview: SongWriter Podcast with Raven Leilani & Elysian Fields
Photos by Raven Leilani, Michael Lavine
SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour, Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean, and Neil Gaiman. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring Raven Leilani + Elysian Fields only at Paste.
Raven Leilani couldn’t breathe. This was back in 2016, before her bestselling novel Luster was published, when she was living in DC. Raven couldn’t figure out what was wrong; her lungs felt like they were stuffed with cotton. Frightened and desperate, she consulted an escalating series of doctors and specialists.
“Cameras down your throat, a barium swallow where they give you a solution that lights up your insides like an X-ray,” Raven recalls. “I have a photo of myself in the hospital with an ‘I voted’ sticker. And that entire night I couldn’t speak, because I’d had a camera down my throat.”
The longer the uncertainty lasted, the more she felt she had to perform her illness to be believed by doctors. Looking back, Raven connects her experience with the systemic racism Black women endure in hospitals and clinics across America.
“Racism, one of its functions is it conditions you to disbelieve your own eyes,” Raven says. “Many of us, we go to these institutions and we say, ‘something is wrong,’ ‘I need help,’ and they send us out in the world with Advil to die.”
Raven reads a story inspired in part by her experiences, “Breathing Exercise,” in the upcoming episode of SongWriter. And she invited one of her favorite bands, Elysian Fields, to write a song in response.