Isaac Dunbar Takes Our Pop Quiz
office gave Isaac an impromptu pop quiz where there are no wrong answers... except, of course, the wrong ones.
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office gave Isaac an impromptu pop quiz where there are no wrong answers... except, of course, the wrong ones.
Founded in a similar gospel, Some Nights I Dream of Doors is a vulnerable, hyper-personal manifesto, rife with the kinds of intimate messages that you either get, or don’t. “Message in a Hammer,” a militant, rhythm section-heavy anthem written in light of injustices at the hands of Nigerian law enforcement, is perhaps most explicitly rooted in OB’s regional worldview — “You can beat me, shoot me, kill me (...) we won’t take it kindly,” he flits, a jungle-esque drum-driven soundscape carrying his croon — but as much as it’s bound not to hit as hard for someone lacking the lived experience, his agenda is more about saying what he has to say, and less about making sure it’s broadly palatable. “I don’t care. If I feel a certain way, I’m going to make the music,” he tells me. “Linton Kwesi Johnson said this thing, one time. He was doing an interview, and the person was like ‘Why are you writing your poetry in Patois? Don’t you want us, the West, to understand it?’ And he said, if you want to understand it, you fucking figure it out. It’s not on me to pertain to you. If you really care about what it is that I’m saying, go figure it out, boy. I’m not gonna rework my shit because I want to fucking sell to you.”
Born in Nigeria, Obongjayar’s start in music came at the hands of disparate American hip-hop albums, melded together with the regional soundscapes that populated his at-home life. At 17, he and his mother moved to the UK, where he remains based today. Since being discovered by Richard Russell, the inventive XL Recordings CEO, in 2017, his music has grown to chart a path just as winding as its geographical footprint: his sharply-accented voice floats between spoken word, soul, reggae and afrobeat, bypassing genre lines with a fluidity that makes it impossible to place him into one box.
Today, it’s been about two weeks since he touched down in the United States for the first time in his life, and he’s quite infatuated with New York City. Though he likely wouldn’t say so himself, the entire matter registers to some extent as a hard-earned victory lap of sorts — Some Nights I Dream of Doors comes at the tail end of six years spent navigating the music industry’s highs and lows on his own. And if the success of this LP indicates anything, it’s that his time being a student of the game has led him to ace the biggest exam of his career. His studious ethos transcends just music, though, and manifests in a restless curiosity about humanity, one that goes on to inform much of what he does with his craft. It’s why he’s taken to New York so well in the short time he’s been here: with an excess of fellow people comes an excess of inspiration. OB’s visit to the US, with stops in both this city and Los Angeles thus far, has highlighted for him a boundless philosophy that well contextualizes his ceilingless songs — anything can happen, and for both himself and the thousands of people he shares any location’s streets with, the same tomorrow always exists.
“Every day you wake up, it’s a new fucking day, bro,” he says, clapping for emphasis. He expresses himself with the too-good-to-be-true cadence of a motivational speaker on 5 cups of coffee, clapping, grinning, running me through it as if, every single day, he discovers it for the first time all over again. “If you fucked up yesterday — you made some bad moves and you lost a lot of money — you can start again tomorrow, bro. You can literally start again. There’s so many opportunities. It’s all there. That’s how I live my life, B. I just try to live each day better than the last. And once you do that, you’re good.”
A concept OB revisits often is that of “keeping it pushing.” In his stirring chorus to the title track of Danny Brown’s 2019 LP uknowhatimsayin¿, he speaks to the doctrine in serpentine croons, and in the office, before I know it, we’re singing his part in the song together. “You see this town wait for nobody, my guy, just hold your composure. And when you’re down it gets cold… wait, what’s the next part?” I fill him in, and we finish the final lines. “My guy, don’t stop now, keep moving,” we sing in unison. “My guy, don’t stop now, keep moving.”
It hits him as if he never knew it until today. “Facts!” he practically jumps out of his seat. “Facts, bro!”
How are you doing today?
I'm doing really good. We're in Nashville right now for the next couple of weeks. It's really thunder-stormy out, it feels nothing like LA. It’s kind of nice... I didn't realize it, but I feel very grounded and happy to be here for this time. My partner owns a house out here, so we come and check on it from time to time. We have a bunch of friends out here and my family's really close. They’re gonna like drive in and visit, just some good downtime in the summer. It feels like everyone left LA... We moved back to Nashville for the pandemic and we bought this baby grand piano and I just started writing. It was a different style than I'm used to working in and I got all of these new songs from that period of time. I didn’t really know how to package them or work with them because they were so different from what I was used to making, but I just went with the process.
That's awesome. And you have new music coming out soon? In August?
Yeah. There's a single coming out on August 5th, called "My Sweetheart".
What was the inspiration behind the song?
When I moved back to Nashville, there was this one morning when I woke up early, and at that time of day there are these little patches of light that hit our living room. Something about that moment and how I don’t always see the light like that because I’m sleeping through it made me pause. I began to think about the night before, my partner and I sitting on the couch watching TV, eating chocolates and making drinks. I looked around and it was like there had been an explosion in the living room. I sat there the next morning looking at the light and wrote it in one shot. It's simple. It's about loving my partner and loving the moment that we are in.
That's amazing. You mentioned the piano and how being in Nashville shifted the sound of your music. I would love to know how you think your sound has evolved since your last release?
It has been a real journey. Playing around with how I tell a story, how I work with time signatures, even experimenting with my voice. I got more heady with the structure and the way that I sing. On my last album I wasn’t as much singing for me — I kept parts of my voice to myself, but this time I really wanted to go deeper and express exactly what I want and use my voice in every way that I can because I have a range and don’t necessarily connect with one sound more than another.
What would you say the inspiration behind the album as a whole has been?
To me it’s about this overall human experience. Taking you through feelings of love and what it means to accept it. I also started talking about some things from my past that I was never able to put in a song cause it was too fresh and addressing some more parental issues. Things that went wrong with my mom and how I recovered from that, going into friendships, and through feelings I experienced in my younger twenties. I really struggled when I hit the point of knowing that I was an adult but didn’t feel like I had the tools for it and how dark that can feel. I wrote one song that’s more about that darkness, about the big circle of human experience. I’m really stoked about the title of that one too, but I can’t tell you that. At it’s core it’s just an album about being a human, covering as much ground as I could in a way that still felt authentic.
You spoke about this a little bit, but I’d love to know more about how you came to embrace getting out of your comfort zone. Where and when did that shift take place?
During No Pain.
From No Pain to, working on this new album, what made you want to go deeper?
Honestly, I would have to say the grand piano was kind of a great way to start that. Just having a different instrument. I treat my voice as an instrument, as all singers do, but I really get focused in on how it should sound. Down to the mic that I use, I am understanding now more and more that I just always want to be exploring. There’s this Childish Gambino quote where someone asked him if it was him or someone else singing on one of his songs and he said something along the lines of, “No it was me, I just sang different.” And I just loved that. For some reason I feel like we have this idea in our head that we’re this marketable package that can do a certain set of things or sounds, when in reality we can do it all if it calls to us. I let me voice meld with the song and transform to carry the music how it deserved to be carried.
I would ask what is next for you, but it sounds like it’s just back to the music!
Yeah. It's back to the music. There's a couple of things that aren't really necessarily confirmed yet. So I won't talk about them, but I’m super excited for this year. Building up for this big album release, it's almost kind of freeing. I also love the fact that I'm not just shoving things down people's throats, just so they are down there, you know, that's so dirty.
Be sure to check out Elke’s new single, My Sweetheart, coming out on August 5th.
Pieces of studio equipment are linked together by an assemblage of thick green wires, each one snaking its way upward until the entire thing settles in a tangled conglomerate near the ceiling. His all-black attire and mad-scientist surroundings give him the distinct image of a menacing kingpin, while his easy voice and boylike grin give credence to a much more modest appeal.
Lil Silva may not call himself an “unsung hero” to his native rap scene, but when he doesn’t feel like bragging, which is often, an expansive track-record of groundwork is well able to suffice. The decade he’s enjoyed in the cockpit of London’s sonic boom has come with a certain sound (one he affectionately calls the “Silva Sound”), curated via years spent helping collaborators find their voices on their own tracks. Now, ages removed from the day he first set out to take on music as a producer, he’s set to release his debut album, Yesterday is Heavy, on the 15th. And if the time that’s passed between his first steps in the music industry and his first project indicate anything, it’s that his yesterday is, indeed, a burdensome one. You can hear it in his voice: it’s mature and weighted, replete with the tonalities of a wise father, but also characterized by the lengthy pauses and stream-of-consciousness self-corrections of someone who isn’t forcing themselves to have it all figured out. Lil Silva comes off as simultaneously young and old, persistently in search of new information, but not to the point where he’s dumping out the decades’ worth of knowledge he’s already garnered. Yesterday is Heavy testifies to a career’s worth of experience-borne lessons — a long-shuttered time capsule of insight, set to give voice to a sound only known up to this point from its work in the shadows.
“It was a lot of getting rid of some past faults and living in the now,” he says. “Getting back to being in the now. Love and hope. It’s so mad how yesterday can carry into today — the heaviness of goals, and everything you’re trying to put the pressure on yourself for… that’s all the shit you’re carrying from yesterday. Yesterday is heavy. The weight of yesterday is heavy. That’s not something you want to be channeling into your today.”
The music is just as timeless as its ethos. Opening track “Another Sketch” boasts a glistening sonic makeup, rife with jumpy synths that sound like what sunlight on undulating river water looks like. The vocals are steeped in a certain knowing bliss, heavy, but with the wistful airiness of a friendly clairvoyant in a dystopian coming-of-age film. “Who isn’t to blame?” he flits lightly over the beat, his voice in equal part commanding and modest. The question, one especially pertinent following a heavy cultural yesterday continually seeping into the present, is a fitting marker of Silva’s detached vision — why go into tomorrow still worrying about who’s at fault for the mishaps of a day ago? Lil Silva is lurching towards whatever's next. And both for his career, and the many characters, experiences, and lessons that informed its decade-long ascent, the slate is freshly wiped.
“No regret man,” he tells me of the project’s making. “Ten years of influences… ten years in the making… what is time, anyway?”
Time isn’t much of a factor for Lil Silva in general, and it’s a rule that doesn’t hesitate to carry over when he’s in the studio. A few years ago, Mick Ronson consulted him for a session with Lady Gaga. Upon being told to play the best thing he was working on, Silva got something going, and when Gaga entered the room, she was in hysterics over how much she enjoyed it. “Oh my God, you made this?” he says, doing his best impression of the singer. “The next six, seven hours into the morning, we were working on that song.” He lets off the same sheepishly-humble chuckle from before. “Yeah man, I don’t really boast that,” he says, with a laugh that screams you got me. “I don’t talk about it. But yes, there’s a lot of cool people I’ve worked with.”
But as much as the cast of “cool people” he’s worked with over the years — Adele, Serpentwithfeet, Banks, etc — may appeal to the clout-chasing brand of hip-hop networking the internet increasingly champions, collaboration for him is more about getting the sound he wants out, and less about basking in the fame that comes with it. “I don’t think music needs to be focused on that,” he says. “You’re just making the best music possible. I feel that having a collaborator on any of this is just a blessing. Like, I want to make this sound the best it can sound, and I fuck with your shit.”
Yesterday is Heavy features collaborations with Little Dragon, Charlotte Day Wilson, BADBADNOTGOOD, Sampha, Skiifall, and more. Whether he’s curating their voices, crooning with his own, hiding in the crevices, or gracing center-stage, every voice included is singing from the future — and it's a future we're all invited to.