Right Here by Janiva Magness

Album: Hard To Kill (2022)

License This Song

Songfacts®:

"'Right Here' is a song about really, truly standing with someone," blues singer Janiva Magness said on the Songfacts Podcast in 2022.

"I didn't really have that in my life until quite a bit later, but to be able to look somebody in the eye, and go, you know what? This isn't working. When you say this, or when you do this, I feel awful. Or you hurt me. And to have that other person not go, "Well, you did this and you did that... well, what about you?" Or run from the room, slam the door, all kinds of other crap. That's not what happens. I look you in the eye. I stand there and I listen and I hear you and I want to hear you. I want you to tell me what's on your mind to be able to move through that with another human being."
This appears on Magness' 16th album, Hard To Kill, which was also her first release in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdown was a particularly difficult time for the singer, who has been performing since she was 19 years old. Without being able to tour and connect with her fans, she felt frozen, like a deer in the headlights.

Thankfully, she had another project to work on - recording the audio version of her 2019 memoir, Weeds Like Us. As it turned out, revisiting her life story was just what her anxious spirit needed. She told Songfacts:

"Whatever anxiety I was having during the pandemic - the real serious shutdown part - rereading my memoir out loud to myself sort of took me back and I thought, what are you worried about? What are you scared of? What do you think's gonna happen? Whoever they are - what do you think they're gonna do to you? It ain't gonna be anything that you can't get through, survive, come out the other side a champion, quite frankly. And that is based on my memoir and the experiences of all of that.

But the point is going into the studio with that headspace made for gloves all the way off. And we're just gonna record this and track this, and I think in that way, the pandemic served to really help me feel like I've got nothing to lose."