Andrea Vocab Sanderson - Elevated (EP)

Our beautiful city of San Antonio just keeps informing me of just how many beautifully talented people we have here & now we can add Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson to that list cause even before catching wind of her music, she had me sold at her alias cause, as I’m a word guy. Andrea is a pillar in our community, mentoring her people & offering them advice & even a platform to express themselves on so automatically you have my respect for that alone, the fact that the music is this good is honestly just a bonus from her but it’s nice to see that she’s taken time aside from these things to offer her 1st project since 2019’s “She Tastes Like Music” but as of late, she’s only “Elevated” baby.

On “Feathers”, it feels like she’s ascending up into the highest of altitudes, her sing songy rhymes on her are impressive, not only cause the flow of them or the syllables but the content, she’s speaking to her fellow sisters, pointing out the strengths she sees in them & standing in solidarity with them as they take on the world, remaining resilient even when faced with adversity. You need to “Be Brave” to conquer such a feat though & for a lot of those, that can be terrifying & I love that she mentioned anxiety cause that’s something that’s personally held me back from taking risks in life, I so badly want to see what lies on the other side of fear & records like this only encourage someone like me to enter the further.

She’s “Focused” as ever, still young like a lot of us so the whole life is still ahead of her, not wasting her time stressing over things that are out of her control & choosing to focus on what she can. Lord knows a lot of us have procrastinated on our own personal growth, not being as tentative to our traumas as we should, waiting til it all bursts out of us like an artesian well before we struggle to get ourselves back on track. On “Elevated Melanin”, she speaks poetry in motion to her people, letting them know that regardless of the ills against them, they shall always overcome. Life seems at times like it’s all just an “Endurance Test” to see how much we can take but God would never put too much on us that we couldn’t handle & Vocab handles it all with the utmost grace.