How Abortion Rights, Black Feminism, and Pandemic Burnout Inspired Seratones’ ‘Love & Algorhythms’ Album
Photo by Joshua Asante
The Louisiana soul-rock group’s new set arrives in the wake of a period that singer-activist A.J. Haynes says she barely remembers, because she “was too busy surviving.”
By Jeff Gage
When the Supreme Court heard opening arguments in the June Medical Services v. Russo abortion case in March 2020, A.J. Haynes was there on the courthouse steps in Washington, D.C., playing music to the gathered protestors. The singer and guitarist for Seratones, a feisty rock- and soul-infused band from Shreveport, Louisiana, trekked across the country from a West coast tour to be there that day: Hope Medical Group for Women, the Shreveport abortion clinic behind the lawsuit, had been Haynes’ workplace since 2008.
Within days of her band returning home, the COVID-19 pandemic stopped her music plans in their tracks, and pushed her work at Hope — one of only three abortion facilities in the state — into a code-red emergency. “We were dealing with a crisis within a crisis within a crisis,” Haynes says over a FaceTime call from New Orleans, where she’s attending a private event between stops on her latest tour.
Just over two years on from that day in D.C., Haynes has emerged with a new Seratones album, Love & Algorhythms, out now on New West Records. It’s a joyous, sensual album that channels the group’s earthy, sometimes feral energy, but belies the trauma that forged it. While the world was gripped by protests in the summer of 2020, Haynes was in her own self-described “crucible” on the medical frontlines. “I was witnessing a lot of suffering, witnessing structures crumbling, witnessing so many different reckonings,” she says.
The frontwoman came upon her advocacy work almost by accident. Her college cover band was invited to play a Christmas party for the Hope staff in December 2008 and she struck up a conversation with the clinic’s founder, Robin Rothrock, who offered her a job. “I never actually thought about my stance [before], I guess,” she admits. “I was just like, ‘This is something that’s necessary. People should be able to do what they need to with their bodies to survive, period.’”
A natural communicator and educator — she was a middle school and high school teacher, gave music lessons, and still organizes music events with kids in Shreveport — she was drawn to the mission. “It’s all interconnected,” Haynes says. “Because for me, it’s all spirit work. Abortion care is spirit work. Music is spirit work.” She’s careful to point out that, contrary to how much of the anti-abortion rhetoric frames it, abortion care extends well beyond being a women’s issue. “It’s a human rights issue,” she says.
Even in normal times, advocating for reproductive justice in Louisiana is an uphill battle. Anti-abortion groups often use it and surrounding states like Texas and Mississippi to introduce legislation, while churches drum up strong support among Democratic Black women who may otherwise be committed to progressive causes – something that “makes [organizing] very, very difficult,” says Michelle Erenberg, the executive director of reproductive rights advocacy group Lift Louisiana. It’s also where Haynes, whose father is Black and mother was Filipino, can be especially valuable. “She recogniz[es] it’s important for them to see other Black women speaking out in support of abortion rights,” Erenberg says.
Convincing donors to help out can be equally difficult. Haynes recalls being told that Southern states were seen as “unwinnable” by outsiders during her campaign work, despite those populations having some of the most acute needs. “It’s a rock and a hard place: We’re in the most vulnerable place, and people also think we’re disposable. It’s insane,” she says. “And yet, they applaud us for our resilience. What kind of f–kery is that?”
Hope eventually won its case at the Supreme Court, but the victory was a temporary one. In the election that fall, a constitutional amendment was passed in Louisiana that, in the event Roe v. Wade gets overturned, would strike down the right to abortions or state funding for them. (Another bill classifying abortion as homicide passed a state legislative committee just last week.) Meanwhile, Haynes and the overworked Hope staff were dealing with a shortage of medical supplies like surgical masks and gowns and taking on patients from surrounding states where services were shut down. She often rotated between the front desk and direct care with patients who had to wait in their cars due to COVID protocols and in some cases couldn’t afford their own masks. Time and again, she consoled them as they wept in the office.
“I just see people’s faces. I see people’s faces, and I see them. I see their struggle,” Haynes says, reflecting on what those months in the summer of 2020 were like. She pauses, her lips pursed, face tightening behind her mirrored cat-eye sunglasses. “I don’t really recall a lot of what that time looked like,” she adds, “because I was too busy surviving.”
Finally it became too much. Before the end of the year, she left Hope for a new role as president of the board directors of the New Orleans Abortion Fund (NOAF), where she’d already been serving on the board of directors in addition to being on the cultural council for the Center for Reproductive Rights. NOAF, among other things, provides services to those seeking abortions, including providing food, gas, and childcare stipends or helping to book hotels. The new position was a chance for Haynes to make a difference on a broader scale. It was also necessary to avoid burn out.
“We can’t be preaching reproductive justice, and then also not take care of ourselves. That’s really antithetical to how I want to move as a leader,” she says. “This idea of self care came from Black feminism. You know, Audre Lorde talks about self care as an act of resistance. And she really means it. Self care is integral to how we survive.”
Haynes threw herself into gardening, where she began seeing patterns in the leaves and the soil. (Even now, as she walks through a residential neighborhood while talking to Billboard, she breaks off from discussing the writings of Octavia Butler or Samuel Delaney to stop and excitedly identify a plant along the sidewalk.) She also turned to the stars, delving deeper into her interest in Tarot and astrology, and embracing the practices of Indigenous peoples and her ancestors. “If Harriet Tubman used the North Star to get to freedom, that’s pretty f–king important technology to use, my friends,” she argues.
All the while, she and her Seratones bandmates were working on the music that eventually became Love & Algorhythms. Two of the band members, bassist Adam Davis and keyboardist Tyran Coker, left during the pandemic, while Haynes — who listened to Donna Summer and Alice Coltrane on repeat, and took to experimenting with writing and recording on Abelton for the first time — worked out song arrangements via Zoom with guitarist Travis Stewart and drummer Jesse Gabriel. The resulting 11 songs take her swampy roots in punk and gospel (she began singing in the church at age 6) and crafts them into a lean, elliptical statement of femininity, spirituality, and cultural pride — half St. Vincent art rock, half Etta James slow burn.
Haynes refers to it as a “protest album,” though the mood often simmers, the imagery a kaleidoscope of Afrofuturist optimism. She traces her cosmic thinking back to artists like Sun Ra, whose expressions of Black beauty took on an otherworldly bent. “I’m not from here. I’m treated like an other, I’m treated as the alien. So let me just be a real alien then,” Haynes says, with a laugh. But much of the music’s message is grounded firmly on this earth, and in the idea of what it means to protest. Haynes points to how, even during the Civil Rights Movement, narratives centered around individual men while ignoring the vital work of Black women. “Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ is seen as a protest song, but it’s not,” she says. “It’s not a song with any answers. It’s a song questioning and witnessing.”
Kam Franklin, the singer for Houston R&B band the Suffers and a close friend of Haynes’, places Haynes in the tradition of icons like Mavis Staples, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin. “Once upon a time, being involved in the Civil Rights Movement was a job for every Black artist that was out at the time because it affected all of them,” Franklin says. “We have a luxury [today] of existing in a place where, all right, we have a lot more choices available to us. But do we really, if our access to voting and healthcare is being taken away?” One of Haynes’ attributes, Franklin adds, is her sense of history. “She knows that it doesn’t just end with her. She knows that the rights in care she had access to [are] something that [were] fought for by the generation before her,” she says.
The magic of Love & Algorhythms is that it addresses these themes in the languages of love — the love of two people, of a family or community, or simply the love for one’s self. “Good Day” and “Get Your S–t Together, Babe” deliver social commentary with a touch of humor; the self-affirmations of “Two of a Kind” and “Power of Your Light” wash over like spiritual cleansings; and “I’ll Be” kicks off like a Billie Holiday dead ringer. The emotional core, however, is “Dark Matter,” a haunting, hymn-like paean that layers Haynes’ vocals like a dispatch from an outer dimension and features a recording of her nephew’s heartbeat.
“I couldn’t have written it by myself,” she says. “That’s what I love about co-writing is that I’m held accountable to this other person, and so I’ll be more honest with another person than I’ll be with myself sometimes.” That song, in particular, forced Haynes to confront certain truths about herself. “I’m terrified to be a mother. Not only because of the unknowns, but because of what I do know,” she admits. “Because if I were to have a child, Louisiana has some of the highest maternal death rates for Black women. [It’s] f–king terrifying.”
But Haynes, as Erenberg sees it, is not one to run away from a difficult situation. “She’s always shown me through the work she’s been doing how committed she is to not backing down and not being afraid to alienate fans of her music by putting these kinds of issues in front of them,” Erenberg says. “I think that’s something that’s pretty rare for musicians, in general, but certainly musicians from the South.”