Alone, Together
Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton on learning how to write their stories separately after a lifelong friendship.
the 23-year-old synth-pop musicians Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton have been best friends since they first bonded over drawing at age 4. That kinship established their tight collaboration as a two-person band named for a grammar gag (note the missing comma). The duo from Norwich, England, arrived just as an emotional streak hit synth-pop (prompted by albums like Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion and Chairlift’s Moth). Their ability to infuse mischief into songs without undercutting poignancy stood out. Let’s Eat Grandma’s sound remained distinct even as they branched off to outside producers including the late sophie. Their upcoming third album, Two Ribbons, is foreign territory: their first written separately. Hollingworth spent much of 2019 grieving her boyfriend, the musician Billy Clayton, who died from cancer that March; simultaneously, Walton was discovering her bisexuality and dating women. For the first time, they had experiences to which the other couldn’t relate. Do you recall when music entered the mix of your friendship?
rosa walton: Quite a lot later on. We wrote joke songs when we were 10 for fun and would make spy movies and attempt to make sweets and dye our clothes with beetroot—things that kids do.
jenny hollingworth: We were really quite atrocious at first.
r.w.: We’ve become slicker as a band. It’s important to retain that initial freedom and creativity that we had back when we weren’t trying to make an album. We were just writing for ourselves.
On the two albums before this, what had writing together been like?
r.w.: We used to sit in a room together and literally one person would say a word and then the other person would come up with an idea off that word.
Even in one line of lyric, it could be really collaborative. And we’d jam. There can be some quite good accidental, interesting combinations of notes. You can’t do that by yourself.
The two of you drifted apart a bit at one point—
j.h.: [Coughs] Sorry, I’m not—
[both laugh]. No, I’m just choking on my feelings.
r.w.: We were still in each other’s company, but then we also weren’t getting on in other ways.
j.h.: It’s not like we stopped talking. Emotionally, we were going through different things and struggling to process those things. And we just couldn’t really get into the other person’s head as we used to do.
r.w.: Whenever we’d have a problem before between us, we’d sit down and talk about it and understand each other’s points of view. This time, we tried to do that a lot, and it was quite confusing why we couldn’t understand each other.
j.h.: It shows, in some ways, that we were pretty young because you’re at that point where you feel like everything has a real clear, logical answer in life.
r.w.: The whole point of the song “Ava” was that you can’t always help people or fix something. That could apply to our relationship—sometimes you’ve just got to accept that different things happen to people. You’ve just got to live with that.
How did it happen that the two of you wrote separately on this album?
j.h.: I didn’t write for a long time after my boyfriend passed away. So it naturally came about that Rosa was writing on her own for a while.
r.w.: At the beginning, I didn’t think I could write a song by myself. Then I thought that it wasn’t a bad thing. It’s
important for me to be writing constantly.
j.h.: As the process of us experiencing things differently went on, it didn’t really make sense to intertwine our perspectives on every single song like it used to.
r.w.: But what we have brought to each other’s songs is great. “Hall of Mirrors” is very much about my experience and then Jenny came in at the end and did an amazing sax solo and some backing vocals that just lifted the whole thing.
j.h.: Same with “Watching You Go.” Rosa did a lot of guitar on that song at the end. We know what the other person’s good at. We know where they’d fill in a gap that we’re not able to reach.
Do each of you have a favorite of the songs that the other wrote?
r.w.: Oh, my favorite of Jenny’s songs is “Two Ribbons.”
j.h.: “Happy New Year” feels significant for our relationship. It’s interesting how it’s the songs that start and end the record.
r.w.: They’re also songs that are at least partly about each of us. “Two Ribbons” is probably the saddest song on the record; “Happy New Year” is emotional but in a different way. It’s more like, We got through this. It’s the nostalgia in that song that makes it sad.
j.h.: After you’ve heard “Two Ribbons,” when you hear “Happy New Year” again, it changes what “Two Ribbons” means. I say, “These places they stay, but we’re changing.” And then you talk about all the places on “Happy New Year.”
r.w.: That is a running theme in the record: struggling to let go of the past, especially where people and relationships are concerned. And just finding it very sad that things do change.
What is the biggest thing you’ve learned from the other?
j.h.: It’s very difficult to explain other than to say I would be a completely different person if I’d never met you. When you are really close to people, who they are gets woven into the fabric of who you are as a person.
We used to go to restaurants and see old couples who’d have nothing to say to each other. But there was this obvious connection—just so much that doesn’t need to be said.
r.w.: There’s only a select few people with whom you can just literally sit in silence and it can be really normal.
j.h.: It makes me think about how grief works. Loss has made me see my relationships with people differently, because you carry parts of people with you even when they’re still here. Death has a lot to teach us about living.
his father calls a family meeting, barking, “I may have to be ‘urban’ at work, but I’m still going to need my family to be Black. Not Black-ish, but Black.” It’s the textbook Dre speech—the first of many—establishing a hard line on race and place for the other characters to carry toward enlightenment.
When Black-ish debuted in 2014, it was hailed as a “revolutionary” work that spoke to Black anxieties and had the potential to shake white audiences. It made a mint prodding viewers to take inventory of their own closely held misconceptions about Blackness. (Donald Trump called it “racism at highest level,” complaining that no one would be allowed to make a show called White-ish.) It was a show about navigating two worlds, about how people of color are asked to self-edit and assimilate in order to move through elite circles, and also about the conflicts among Black boomers, Gen X–ers, and zoomers over self-expression, protest, romance, and identity.
Series creator Kenya Barris grew up loving The Cosby Show and made his mark on television in the aughts as a writer for the UPN sitcom Girlfriends and a developer for the same network’s America’s Next Top Model. He brings an appreciation of sitcom history to the affair. As much as the plight of the Johnsons resembles that of the Huxtables, the conversations they have around the house seem patterned after the divisive Norman Lear shows. The kids push back against Dre the way Gloria and Michael nudge Archie Bunker on All in the Family. Their family debates helped the show achieve an intergenerational bird’seye perspective on the topic of the week.
But it also treated hearing both sides of the issue as a virtue, an end in itself, even as it implicitly endorsed its patriarch’s point of view. Now that it’s over, it’s worth reconsidering how it handled the complexities of Black thought in rapidly changing times. Over eight seasons and three presidencies, Black-ish fostered vital conversations, but you wonder how much of its success can be attributed to its concessions and how much feistier the series could’ve been were it only a little less defensive of Dre’s, or Barris’s, perspective. How uncomfortable did it allow its viewers, or its characters, to ever really get?
in many ways, Dre is a stand-in for Barris. Raised in Los Angeles in Inglewood and Pacoima, Barris saw the trajectory of his life change drastically after his father lost a lung in an accident and won a settlement that lifted the family into a new tax bracket. Black-ish pulled from that and from Barris’s life as a parent of six with his wife, Dr. Rania “Rainbow” EdwardsBarris, an anesthesiologist whose biracial background is mirrored in the journey of doctor-mom Rainbow “Bow” Johnson. The show’s outlook seems to have been informed by the trajectory of the Black television writer excelling in Hollywood. It is success oriented and deeply attentive to optics. Dre and Bow are getting to the money, and they think they represent us all, so they must move carefully. But rarely were Dre and Bow checked in their belief that Black capitalism can save everyone.
In the series opener, Dre says he’s an inspiration to his Black co-workers: “There were so few of us at Stevens and Lido that being Black made it feel like you were part of a little family. So when one of us made it, it was kind of like we all did. And right now, I was that one.” How the family he daps up on the way to the office might feel about the firm having space for only the one isn’t mentioned. In season seven, when Bow becomes a partner at the hospital, she abruptly realizes the young Black women coming up in the field view her as a supervisor and not a
friend. The final-season premiere sees her hanging out with Michelle Obama, after which Bow yearns for a peer group she can never have and laments how lonely it is at the top after all these years. Dre tells her it is thanks to her work that those women even have a cohort in their profession. Black-ish
offers her a pat on the back for being a boss instead of wrestling with how she might not be the best one and why that is.
The show felt more comfortable going there earlier on. It set musical numbers on plantations in the exquisite, informative season-four opener, “Juneteenth.” But the approach shifted as the tone of the national discourse soured around the Trump election. Suddenly, Black-ish had a valuable platform in a moment of great racial tension. What passed as edgy before the mayhem of 2016 rapidly felt tepid. Black-ish
tried to mind the changes, but its flair for cozy resolutions softened its message. Season three’s “Lemons” met the Trump presidency head-on, but its assessment feels late and pat now. “Instead of letting this destroy us,” Dre suggests in a speech at the end of the episode, “we take the feeling you guys felt the day after the election and say that morning we all woke up knowing what it felt like to be Black.” It was wild to tell white people that not getting one thing they want is akin to Blackness. The feel-good message feels less good when you know how many white liberals came down with “ally fatigue” in the Trump years.
Black-ish put its thesis plainly in season two’s “Hope,” where a family chat about police brutality gets hopeless and the only thing they can agree on is the merit of talking through the issues. It was cathartic but ultimately quaint. The message of the protest movements of 2014 and 2020 wasn’t “Hey, let’s get everyone talking.” It was that solutions are multifaceted. Cultural sensitivity was important; so was making people uneasy.
The series’ most uncomfortable moments stem from the characters’ burning desire to be respected, seen as pioneers in their industries. Dre is afraid of selling out but is also an overachiever who craves business accolades and the approval of his co-workers, even if it means fielding their kooky misconceptions about Black people and saving their asses in questionable campaigns. White validation is important to Dre, even if he resents always being called on to provide a diluted Black perspective. He makes even that into a self-competition. “White people trust me to tell them about Black people and what they want,” he boasts in season three’s “Richard Youngsta,” one of
Black-ish’s worst episodes. Chris Brown plays the titular rapper, who stars in a
liquor ad Dre is tapped to craft. No one in the office takes issue with a scene where one sip transforms a frowning Black woman into a flirty white one. We later watch Dre defend Stepin Fetchit when his wife and mother accuse him of profiting off harmful stereotypes, much like how the actor made millions portraying lazy Black characters in the 1930s: “Without Lincoln Perry paving the way, we might not have a Denzel.” All this splitting hairs about the gains made in spite of minstrelsy feels ginned up, an excuse for the episode to unpack its own historical implications unchallenged.
Junior and Dre’s relationship highlights a key area where Black-ish consistently missed its mark. Junior is the namesake, and he turned out nerdy, and he is constantly having his masculinity and Blackness interrogated in ways that rarely feel critical of the characters doing the piling on. They don’t get along until the end, when the son becomes his father, landing both a job at Stevens and a girlfriend studying to become a doctor. Only then does Dre apologize for spending the entire franchise trying to force Junior to be someone else entirely and failing to appreciate the considerate, emotionally intelligent kid he raised. He seems surprised his kids turned out the way they did, as if their moneyed airs weren’t almost entirely thanks to his needling insistence on enjoying the same signifiers of wealth as affluent white professionals.
When Dre wakes up in the Black-ish pilot suddenly deeply upset about the gap between the interests, ideas, and mannerisms of his children and what he feels is a more traditional Blackness, he’s really sitting in conflict with his own choices. This was always a show about a midlife crisis; the concerns of the children and grandparents orbit Dre’s version of existentialism. And a show about a lovable crank can only change him so without disturbing its core dynamic.
Black-ish goes out the way it came in. Dre gets dressed to “Jesus Walks” (again), but something’s different. His 2014 monologue was about exclusion: “I guess for a kid from the hood, I’m living the American Dream. The only problem is whatever American had this dream probably wasn’t from where I’m from.” Now, having won a Super Bowl commercial, he’s happy he found a way to “go from broke to the Oaks without a jump shot, a No. 1 hit, or being Tyler Perry.” Just last episode, Dre told Junior he regretted “thinking that the most important thing was getting the same opportunities as my white counterparts.” He meant business. Dre leaves Stevens and Sherman Oaks behind for a beautiful home in proximity to Black families.
I wish these characters could have a doover. Imagine if the dinner banter didn’t always revolve around criticizing someone’s Blackness. If the Johnsons really sought out Black friends. What if fewer punches were pulled? What if we left things messy instead of virtuous? What if “Please, Baby, Please,” the season-four stunner in which the Johnsons each speak with unrestrained honesty about their Trump-era fears, wasn’t shelved for two years? What if Black-ish didn’t have any interest in selling us the dream that in our darkest hours, Americans always help each other? We’ve seen too much of the worst of each other now to buy in.