Sanctum: Fiawna Forté
Moonbeam Conservatory
May 16, 2026
On the east end of Kendall Whittier, just half a block past The Whittier Bar, there’s an unassuming storefront with blackout curtains so you can’t see inside. As I approached on a recent Saturday night, I could see the sun setting over Greenwood and even hear the engines of thousands of motorcycles revving at the bike rally in the distance.
Inside the storefront, the scene was anything but unassuming. Hundreds of flowers leaned against the walls, some in buckets, some in bouquets. Spanish moss hung from the ceiling rafters. Everything was glowing in the dark. It’s times like these I wish I wasn’t color blind.
This is Tyler Thrasher’s Moonbeam Conservatory, open after normal business hours for a concert series called Sanctum, where Tulsa’s music collides with Tulsa’s art under black lights. On this night, in front of a few dozen black folding chairs sat a drum kit, a couple of guitars, a mic, a piano, and a chair off to the side, all ready for Fiawna Forté to perform with Kiersten Moser on violin and Mason Remel on drums.
While folks mingled before the show, I wandered around Thrasher’s wonders: insects on display with crystallized wings, a snake’s skeleton climbing the wall, and glowing stones set into wood. In the back, you can see the tools of Thrasher’s trade and a case full of more sparkling oddities covered in geodes and crystals.
Once the evening started, Thrasher explained that the lighting would move back and forth between black lights and glowing flowers, with the occasional beams of sunlight from latecomers opening the door. It felt right, in this creative and almost therapeutic space, that Forté started the night with “Til You See Me," a song she wrote during the pandemic. This stripped-down set was different from her usual full-band shows, which feature a tight group doing slow builds and hard drops. Forté commanded the mic, but the music was more subtle, featuring her voice above all else. She’d sing back and forth with the violin’s strings while the soft gongs of the cymbals sent waves of thunder across the glowing flowers. The instruments never overpowered the moment.
Forté introduced many of her songs with stories that showed her healing from trauma through music, and those songs have lyrics that pierce: “They sunk their teeth into my spine without remorse.” She closed the first set with a new song she’d written the day before with her partner Kasy Anderson; after loading a U-Haul, they’d sat down tired and lamented about life, which turned into strumming, then into a song. During her Sanctum show, Forté invited Anderson to the stage, and they sang together while staring into each others’ eyes. It was Anderson’s first time on the mic, and like the moment they wrote it, it was sweet.
After a short intermission, Forté shared another story. She was 18 years old, writing songs and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her music. From the kitchen, another friend, Damion Shade, shouted: “Write a song about a boat!” She did, and later made a music video for “Boat Song,” directed by Sterlin Harjo. The first line resonated with the entire set: “I had a boat, but the world sunk me down.”
The evening’s set list and stories continued Forté’s themes of compassion and restoration. After being on tour for years, suddenly she felt a pain that would keep her nearly bedridden. “I couldn’t get out of bed, but I could hold a guitar. It saved my life,” she told the crowd. “The songs songwriters resonate the most with are the ones they wrote for themselves. Songs about what we need to hear.” And what did she need to hear? “Sweet darlin’, don’t you waste another day.”
Forté closed with her favorite of her songs, which is mine too. She said she wrote “Hey You” after nine years of not playing, thinking about being done with life; it’s one of the only songs she wrote front to back all at once. “I wrote it for myself,” she said, “but now it’s yours.” After hearing the story and listening closer to the words, I knew why it was my favorite too: “Hey you there dying. Hey you there trying,” she sings, and the chorus promises “I’ll fall in love with you if you just ask me to.” Forté’s stories resonated with my own: music heals. It can save your life.
The night ended while the sun was still settling past the horizon, and I carried Sanctum’s sounds and images with me into the dusk. Forté’s voice can climb mountains and descend valleys at a moment’s notice with a vibrato as prominent in her screams as in her whistles and whispers. It’s as well worth an intentional listen as Thrasher’s studio is worth an intentional visit.
