Love Is the Center of Gravity on Thee Sacred Souls’ Constellation Tour

Photo by Alejandra Sol Casas

Thee Sacred Souls returned to San Antonio on Thursday, Sept. 10, bringing The Constellation Tour to Freeman Coliseum with LA LOM and The Womack Sisters. Together, the three acts formed the bright cluster of talent behind the tour’s name, each occupying its own musical orbit while cosmically aligning around the shared center of gravity: love.

The Womack Sisters opened the night. BG, Zeimani and Kucha Womack are members of one of American soul music’s great dynasties: daughters of Linda and Cecil Womack, better known as Womack & Womack; granddaughters of Sam Cooke; and nieces of Bobby Womack. Before stepping forward as a trio, the sisters spent their childhood performing with their parents and later toured as backing vocalists for their uncle Bobby.

Their family history only explains where they came from, not what they do with it. Trading leads and weaving their voices into three-part harmonies, the sisters showed that while their musical lineage runs deep, their artistry stands firmly on its own.

Los Angeles trio LA LOM followed with “La Danza de LA LOM,” with their instrumental patchwork of cumbia, bolero, surf guitar, and other sounds absorbed from across Los Angeles and Latin America.

They performed “Luchando,” a collaboration with Peruvian psych-cumbia legends Los Mirlos, which brought Amazonian and indigenous influences together in a song dedicated to LA LOM’s home city of Los Angeles.

The band also has its own history with San Antonio. LA LOM played Stable Hall during the venue’s inaugural year before returning for a larger show at the Aztec Theatre. At Freeman Coliseum, they acknowledged Texas more directly with a cover of Selena’s “Como La Flor,” a song requiring little introduction in South Texas.

The Womack Sisters later returned to the stage to join LA LOM for “Unchain My Heart,” before Thee Sacred Souls took over.

The first time I saw Thee Sacred Souls was at Jaime’s Place, a small family-owned bar on the West Side. On Thursday night, they commanded the city’s third-largest venue, Freeman Coliseum.

The room was considerably larger, but frontman Josh Lane spent much of the night trying to make it feel smaller.

Intimacy is central to Thee Sacred Souls’ music. During “Can I See You Again?,” Lane left the stage and disappeared into the general admission crowd before making his way into the stands, sending us photographers scrambling to keep up as he sang directly to audience members. He would make the journey several more times throughout the set.

The band offered another nod to San Antonio’s musical history with a cover of the Royal Jesters’ “We Go Together.”

Blue light later washed over the stage while cell phone lights dotted the stands like little stars for “For Now,” cooling the room for one of the evening’s quieter moments. Couples swayed and held each other as Lane sang of asking to be loved while wondering whether that love would last.

But love, as Thee Sacred Souls presented it Thursday, wasn’t limited to romance.

Before “Love Is the Way,” Lane reflected on soul music’s long history of intertwining love and resistance. He spoke about a culture that equates dominance and force with earning respect, an idea he said the past three years had shown him to be “poisonous.” In its place, he offered love as its own form of power, telling the crowd how powerful “the love of all” can become when placed in the right hands.

“I feel this is the right hands right here,” he said.

Later came a more existential bit of Lane philosophy.

“Life is psychedelic without drugs,” he told the crowd, pondering the coexistence of horror and wonder, speaking on the dread of children in Palestine being wiped from the earth alongside the miracle of new life, as his brother had recently made him an uncle. The juxtaposition led into “On My Mind.”

There was something slightly psychedelic, too, about watching a band I first encountered packed into Jaime’s Place now command Freeman Coliseum. The venue had grown. The crowd had grown. Yet the fundamental appeal of Thee Sacred Souls hadn’t changed much at all. Lane still sang as though he were trying to reach one person at a time.

The band closed with “Can I Call You Rose?,” the song that first introduced many listeners to Thee Sacred Souls.

Across three sets, Thursday night traced both the constellations from which these artists emerged and the trajectories they are charting for themselves. The Womack Sisters carried generations of soul. LA LOM mapped musical pathways across cities, countries, and cultures. And Thee Sacred Souls showed how far a band can travel without losing sight of what first drew people toward it.