On the Rise
Joy Guidry

“I wanted to write music this time around that helps me, and if it helps me, maybe it'll help other people,” Guidry says. Amen became a place where she could be honest, without giving away too much of herself.

Though the classically-trained bassoonist has mastered the conservatoire and the concert hall, her ideas pull her instrument into entirely different places. Before playing a stressful show, she might stick on Ana Roxanne, or Cleo Soul, or Solange - music gone to as a source of calm. The same calm can be felt in the song "Day By Day", where her bassoon bursts out of flecks of piano and smudged soundplay. In Amen’s use of consonance and uplifting motifs, she translates how contemporary R&B acts like Jazmine Sullivan, Yazmin Lacey or Jalen Ngonda might make her feel. And the music of her childhood home in Houston and summers spent in Louisiana became a point of inspiration when crafting the record’s gospel songs with a wide cast of vocalists and friends, including Jillian Grace, Niecy Blues and KeiyaA.

“For me, gospel music actually came on Saturdays”, she says. “I grew up Catholic, so we didn't really sing so much in church, but it's really common in Black households in the States that Saturday is the cleaning day.” That introduced her to singers like Kirk Franklin, Marvin Sapp and Yolanda Adams.

The switch between bassoon-led ambient, gospel and jazz on Amen might be jarring if not directed by an artist so aware of the inner mood being conveyed, of how these sounds make her feel. Combining these different forms felt natural.

“I just leaned on my own understanding and remembered that there are no genres in Black music, you know?”, she tells me. “People push back on that, but it all comes from the same source. Even though I play the bassoon and I’m classically trained, let's do this blues song. Let's see what happens. Let's bring the people on that I know can do this. The Southern mentality really jumped out.”

Guidry isn’t new to playing with expectations. Her early live shows combined noise, poetry and improvisation. For those in the crowd, it might be the first time they’ve heard a bassoon sound like that. “When I talk to other students, they're like, ‘how did you write this?’, and I'm like, ‘it's just like Brahms’” she jokes. “I'm not playing the bassoon any differently…I practice my long tones, I practice my scales. My fundamentals are still there. That's what I want people to know. With your classical instruments, you don't have to change what you've learned, you're just expressing it in a different way.”

Guidry has only been composing for a few years, but her ambition is obvious. Though our interview is about Amen, she mentions an upcoming 2026 record with even more players, partly inspired by Julius Eastman, and a folk EP combining banjo and bassoon. “It’s fun, taking the bassoon completely out of the normal context into these sometimes funky places,” she says. “I always love playing for other bassoonists. Even the ones that are more conservative with the music, I've been winning them over.”

The personal weight of Amen’s gospel inversions is heard on "Pick and Choose", which samples a 2015 sermon by Pastor E. Dewey Smith about homophobia in the church: “We pick and choose the scriptures that wanna we use to beat folk up with, rather than look at our own lives,” he shouts. Guidry uses Smith’s words to introduce her version of "Members Don’t Get Weary", originally by Max Roach.

“It told a truth that I feel like people are afraid to say,” she says. “And it came from the most powerful person in a lot of these people's lives - their pastor, who can do no wrong.”

The echo of her Southern upbringing lingers, in joyous and difficult ways. “I've tried to run away from my country mentalities, and then I'll do something in front of my friends who are also from the South, and they're like, ‘damn, mask bitch’”, she laughs. “But I really wanted to get in touch with myself. And to get in touch with my transness, my Blackness, my queerness, I have to go to where home is. What made me like this? You could say I’m a loud person because I felt like I was silenced for 18 years.” Later in our conversation, she says that the church made her live a lie: “It made me completely comply with my family's emotions, and whisper about my queerness, literally whisper."

On "Members Don’t Get Weary", Guidry sounds assured directing a busy mix of vocalists and jazz soloists, but she’s open about her unsureness entering the session. “To be very honest, I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “It's my own recording, and I just didn't know what it needed, and I was a little embarrassed.”

“The way that [Radical Acceptance] was received, and the messages I would get from people after shows, I decided I don't want to do that again. It was a little too personal for me,” she says, keen to guard private details. Amen's blissful second track, "It’s Okay To Let Me Go", has a backstory that she describes as horrific, but she knows what to give away and what to keep for herself. “It's a story reserved for very few people in my life”, she says. “The public gets this other story, that it's about letting go, living your life and all of that, but y'all don't need to know what it is.”

The intensity of her early live shows earned Guidry acclaim and admiration, but it’s also led to uncomfortable encounters. “When people come and dump it on to me, it's like, okay, you are going back to mammifying people, you know? You're seeing me as this plus-size Black femme, like, I can take it. I'm here to make you comfortable,” she says. “My job is not to comfort any of these people.”

Guidry has never shrunk herself down as an artist. She’s currently pursuing a PhD in Music at University of California, San Diego. Her projects still have free range. “There's an academic way of writing, of speaking, and I don't code-switch in my regular day, so why would I do it there?" she tells me. "I think what it makes me do is write more in-depth and get more serious with the research. It's fun to do that. It won't change. The music will still sound like me. It'll just make me a doctor.”

In 2018, Guidry’s impressive live performances caught the eye of Andre 3000, who happened to be in the audience during a concert she played in New York. She describes it as one of the hardest she’d ever played. “I'm so happy I pulled it off, but I was the only Black person on stage, so he could really lock in what I was doing.” The next night, he approached her at the New School. The two kept in contact. Last year, when she messaged him to ask if he had any spare tickets to his San Fransisco solo show, he asked her to play.

“It felt wild. Like, wow, we really came from the east side of Houston," she says. "Me and my parents have a weird relationship, but they worked hard to get me here and paid for a lot of shit in high school with music, It's like, this shit is really working out!

“Talking with Dre over the years, it definitely normalised him, which I'm happy about. I don't really like to see these huge artists as huge artists. I still give them the respect, but I don't want this presence to freak me out. I downplay a lot of stuff in my life, so that was a good moment to really lock in and celebrate myself, and I still didn't do it around them, but I got back to my hotel room and I flipped the fuck out.”

Amen ends in aching stillness with "Revelations 7:16-17" (The verse goes: “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat”). Now Guidry describes herself as more spiritual than strictly Catholic. She connects to faith in her own way. “I'll probably never go to church again the rest of my life and be just fine…When my family is like ‘you should go for Christmas’, I'm like, ‘I have church right here in this living room’.

“With a funeral that I was supposed to go to a couple years ago, I couldn't do it for many reasons. I didn’t want to go back to church, so I had a funeral in my house. I'm celebrating my great-aunt here. I don't really need to do it with y'all. I don't need to do it in this building.”

There’s heaviness in Amen, but much of it feels like a deep exhale. Even in its blasts of chaos, it’s hopeful. Guidry sees life differently now. “Now I really can look through a lot of the rough memories? And for this album I wanted to write songs that reminded me of some of the best memories with my family.”

I ask what the Revelations verse means to her. “It's all going to be okay, you know. One day this will all end. And I don't know if it's the end of the world, or just the end of this struggle.”