Vital queer voice Christinna O releases intimate R&B track "Lay It Down"

Though Christinna is only 19, it's already five years since she dropped her first mixtape. That experience shines on "Lay It Down", a cut that breathes fresh life into the minimal R&B framework. The new track hits the Goldilocks zone between under-baked and overwrought; the meticulous work of a self-taught musician with a diverse wealth of influences accessed via the internet during Christinna's home-schooled teen years.

Christinna's work has already taken her to presigious heights within the literary sphere, competing in the NAACP's national slam poetry competition and leading her university's poetry collective. It's little wonder, therefore, that her voice as a rising queer artist is an utterly vital one. On "Lay It Down", she confronts the vulnerability inherent in interpersonal relationships, explaining that: "this song is about intimacy. It's a choice and a permission, to let someone else know that they are welcome and they are the one I’m ready to lay down my burdens with. To feel valid in my vulnerability but ultimately, love."

Christinna also discusses here different approaches to writing when it comes to songs as opposed to poetry, adding that: "when I’m talking about personal pain or trauma, I’m going to be ten times more in-depth in a poem than in a song. It’s easy for a song to get convoluted and lose its function for an audience if I write it like a poem. I do talk about the same topics in poetry and music: I talk about love, I talk about pain, I talk about my forms of introspection. Poetry dives a little bit deeper, which is why I try to incorporate it into the music, but I know the audiences are different."