NEW YORK, NY.- “A song can make you hear or understand things that you don’t know how to say,” English singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka said. “I think of songs as ways to communicate without conversation.”
For more than a decade, Kiwanuka, 37, has been creating songs that speak directly and soulfully. Most often, he uses just a handful of chords and succinct, open-ended lyrics. But his words often turn into incantations over lush, organic grooves that reach back to vintage R&B, psychedelia and trip-hop. The songs offer questions and life lessons, mingling the personal and the political, balancing sorrow and solace.
“Music heals me,” Kiwanuka said in a video interview from his home in England. “So that’s what I try and do.”
Kiwanuka’s fourth studio album, “Small Changes,” is due in November, while in September and October he will be touring North America as a co-headliner with Brittany Howard.
“I’m amazed by his songwriting; I think it’s classic,” Howard said from her home in Nashville, Tennessee. “There’s an art form to being vulnerable and telling your story, but also keeping it simple so that other people can relate to it,” she added. “The mood he’s creating, the stories he’s telling — it feels like I’m being let in on a little secret or something, like a close friend of mine is telling me their life.”
Kiwanuka, whose parents are from Uganda, was born and grew up in London, often feeling like an outsider. “Maybe it’s an immigrant thing — you’re always trying to discover yourself,” he said. Playing guitar was his release.
As a teenager, he recalled, he’d spend all week looking forward to the two hours on Fridays when he and a neighbor with a drum kit had permission to plug in and blast away, learning songs from Nirvana and the Offspring.
“It was everything,” Kiwanuka said, his eyes lighting up at the memories. “Guitars and bands, that’s the place where the misfits go. If you don’t fit in, or you’re not developing in a certain way, or you don’t have a girlfriend, you have this — it’s cool. It’s like a big coat that covers you from all the stuff that a lot of people have to deal with.”
Kiwanuka studied jazz at college, but decided on a different musical path: less showy and convoluted, more evocative. “For me, simple chords or progressions allow people in,” he said. “And then once people are in, they might hear something. I feel the hardest thing to do is to make something profound and artistic with something so simple.”
When he started writing songs in the early 2000s, Kiwanuka was drawn to American music from an era before he was born, particularly the thoughtful 1970s soul of songwriters such as Bill Withers, Terry Callier and Marvin Gaye.
“I didn’t see myself in the music of the day, so I went elsewhere,” he said. “I started off being the Ugandan making music in London, who was being influenced by American music. It was like a blank canvas. There was no one to look at and watch and say, ‘That’s me, I’m going to do that.’”
Kiwanuka’s musical identity was already clear on his 2012 debut album, “Home Again.” It was the opposite of trendy or flashy; it relied on hand-played instruments, unhurried grooves and elegant arrangements for strings and winds. From the beginning, his lyrics sought a long view; the album’s first words are “Tell me a tale that always was/Sing me a song that I’ll always be in.”
His second album, “Love & Hate” in 2016, inaugurated a collaboration that has endured: a triumvirate with English producer Inflo (Dean Josiah Cover), who leads the underground R&B collective Sault, and American producer Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), who founded Gnarls Barkley and has worked with Norah Jones, the Black Keys, Adele and U2. Inflo and Danger Mouse helped Kiwanuka create even more spacious tracks, with subtle details and extended dramatic arcs. Kiwanuka collaborated with them through his 2019 album, “Kiwanuka” — which won the Mercury Prize, Britain’s long-running award for artistic excellence — and on “Small Changes.”
The songs often grow out of studio jams. “You start at the beginning of the day and you’re not sure what’s going to happen,” Danger Mouse said in a telephone interview. “And at the end of the day, you have the bones of one of these songs.”
He added, “I know it sounds like an advertisement, but the quality of his playing and of his singing is something that just sounds timeless. It sounds like something that’s always been here.”
The five years between albums brought the pandemic and then a belated return to touring; Kiwanuka also became a father. Onstage, he and his band leaned into the dynamics of his songs, from meditative vamps to cathartic peaks. He also discovered how deeply his songs had reached listeners.
“There’s always somebody — you find two or three people at the front who are really, really crying,” he said. “That didn’t happen that much, that intensely, before COVID. Fans who know the music are really connecting now to the deeper feeling. And it’s really beautiful to experience.”
The songs on “Love & Hate” and “Kiwanuka” — including “Black Man in a White World” and “Hero” — grappled with racism, violence, self-doubt, renewal and faith. On “Small Changes,” Kiwanuka has grown “more inward, more intimate,” he said.
The album also pares away some of the layers of production that used to enfold Kiwanuka’s voice. “It’s a little bit more naked, a little more sparse, a little bit more exposed maybe,” Danger Mouse said. “But that takes a little courage as well.”
There are songs about facing doubts and depression; there are also songs about long-term love and weathering ups and downs that wouldn’t be out of place at a wedding.
“These are songs I wasn’t really brave enough to sing or put on a record,” Kiwanuka explained. “There’s different parts of you. There’s the part of you that wants to make great songs, which goes across everything. Then there’s a part of you that wants to be like, cool, and then there’s a part of you that wants to be musically respected. And there’s a part of you that wants to have songs that people can sing. And then there’s a part of you that wants to be relatable to people your age, or your peers.
“There’s so many parts that you are discovering — sometimes wrestling with, sometimes enjoying,” he continued. “‘Small Changes’ for me is like, ‘Oh, that’s off my chest.’ So this is me being me, without trying to be anything.”
The album’s title song counsels patience and perseverance. “You look at a mountain before you start walking and it’s like you’re never going to do it — it’s overwhelming,” he said. “But with one step after another, small changes — that allows you to climb the mountain.”
Kiwanuka has his own vision of success as a songwriter. “The highest compliment for me is if I walked down in the tube and someone was busking a song of mine,” he said. “If someone was busking ‘Small Changes’ with a beat-up acoustic, and it was moving people — that’s the hardest thing to achieve. That’s utopia for me.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
