Four years have passed since Michael Kiwanuka was last on promotional duties. Back then, he was hawking his debut album (Home Again) and was the BBC Sound of 2012 pin-up. The young, soft-spoken London singer-songwriter was on the up escalator with his well-crafted songs of soul, folk and country leaning.
The tracks on Kiwanuka's follow-up album, Love & Hate, still have edges. It's an album of grit and darkness, in which he upgrades and embellishes material with wigged-out strings and sounds. For a man who has always held his acoustic guitar as a badge of honour, there's a heck of a lot of electricity here.
Still, the songs that appear on Love & Hate weren't Kiwanuka's first call for his follow-up.
“The first set of songs I wrote for the album just weren’t right,” he says. “I like them, but they weren’t good enough, and you have to be able to kill your babies.
“If you want to do something good, you have to push yourself and sacrifice a lot. Sometimes it’s your own art because you need to get better. It was difficult at the time. If you’re struggling to get somewhere, you do have doubts and it’s always hard to accept that you need to do something else.”
Like the writer with a few run-outs for novels in the desk drawer, Kiwanuka hasn’t completely abandoned those songs. “I do want to go back to them. I don’t think they’re bad songs necessarily, but I don’t think they were right for the time I was at. They could still work.”
Kiwanuka knew where he wanted to be, but didn’t know how to get there.
“I knew musically that I wanted to do something different, but I didn’t know what. I knew I wanted to do something different to the first album. It took a bit of time to get it right.”
Inflo attainment
It also took some collaborations to get Kiwanuka out of a rut. The first was with London hip-hop producer Inflo.
“My management suggested that I meet him. We got on and we started to make music together. He had preconceptions about me, but that’s okay because everyone has those to begin with. He listened to my music, had some thoughts about how I make music and what I was trying to do. And the more we got to know each, the more surprised we were about what we do. He was a big influence.”
Kiwanuka knows that a singer-songwriter working with the likes of Inflo will often be seen as a big deviation from the norm.
“A lot of artists do the thing of protecting themselves by surrounding themselves with things and people they’re comfortable with, and that they know,” he says. “But you need to get out of that situation and be around people and situations that you don’t know. You have to have a fresh approach because it’s when creativity takes over.
“I think your music and your art suffer if you stick to what you know all the time. I would recommend doing what I did 100 per cent.”
Kiwanuka’s next collaborator was superstar producer Danger Mouse.
"He's made records I liked, so I wanted some of that in my music. I've been a fan of his work for years. I remember being in school when Gnarls Barkley came out with Crazy. I loved the first Broken Bells' record and the Black Keys El Camino and Norah Jones. "
Different styles
“My process of making songs before would have me writing on my acoustic guitar and maybe a piano. Brian [Burton, Danger Mouse] works differently. He’d start with a bassline or chords or beat and everything else comes later, whereas I used to write lyrics at the same time as the melody.
“I realised watching him work that that was how he got his songs so right. He has this amazing strong attention to detail when it comes to melodies and lyrics. It’s hard work and grit.”
For Love & Hate, Kiwanuka took his cues from a lot of late 1960s and 1970s albums. He mentions Funkadelic's Maggot Brain and Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul, as well as Nina Simone, Minnie Riperton and Pink Floyd.
Subversive qualities
“They were making music that was unique and didn’t fit in at the time,” he says. “Someone like Minnie Riperton, she wasn’t your classic female soul singer. Funkadelic, too, weren’t the norm; they had subversive qualities, and I really got that. I don’t see myself as a soul singer or rock artist because I’m in between.”
Lyrically, he went dark. "I chose to go dark for inspiration for lyrics for the songs. I want to sing about tough things and be a bit more transparent and vulnerable lyrically. It was important for me to put myself out there like Kendrick [Lamar] or Frank Ocean. "
One of the things that inspires Kiwanuka is his Christian faith and his membership of the St Luke’s community in London. “It’s a part of me and I put a part of me in all the songs I do,” he says. “It inspires the lyrics, the sound of the chords and how I live as well.”
But it’s also something that he thinks the music industry would prefer he didn’t talk about.
“You get advised not to say anything about it by labels and media people. I don’t know why that it is. It’s not seen as cool and people want cool.
“I believe there are a lot of people out there exploring their spirituality, but if you’re around record labels and TV shows and magazines, it’s different because the people who run those are older and have certain strong feelings about religion. But I think kids and young people out on the street don’t think like that. It’s a fascinating subject because people don’t talk about it.”
Faith not cool
According to Kiwanuka, “It’s not overt, but there’s not really that many Christians in the music business. There are some people who used to be or come from a Christian background, like the Kings of Leon, but it’s not something you’re supposed to talk about.
“It’s not cool. It’s cooler not to be a Christian. If I said I didn’t like religion or whatever, it would be regarded as a far cooler thing to say by many people.
“I wonder if there are many Christians out there in the music business. I don’t know any, and . . .” he says, laughing, “if there are some, it’s probably a secret.”
