Michael Kiwanuka - Black Man in a White World

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by booking.com, and I'm going to go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June. So I'm putting in the dates. For the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals.

I'm going to narrow it down to hotels and filter the results based on my budget and my tastes. And okay, there we go. There's still over 20 options for me to choose from. I'm gonna look at the ones that are closest to the venue where I'm playing. And then I'm gonna check out all the reviews and pick the one that feels most like me.

Besides being close to the venue, I also want to be within walking distance of great food, preferably a great dessert. And if I can find my perfect stay on booking.com, then anyone can. Find exactly what you're booking for at booking.com. Booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app.

Song Exploder is sponsored by Intuit TurboTax. I don't know if you have this feeling, but I constantly find myself daydreaming about finding an expert who can solve a very specific problem in my life. And one specific problem that comes up every year is filing taxes. But luckily, finding someone who can solve that problem is easy with TurboTech.

They have dedicated tax experts who are there to help you every step of the way. With TurboTax Expert Full Service, you can match with an expert who will handle your taxes from start to finish, no matter how complex. You can even hand off all your tax stuff within the TurboTax app. And then you can see updates on your experts' progress while you go about your day. You can check exactly where your tax return stands right there on your phone.

And then if someone ever says to you, Man, I wish there were an expert who could do my taxes for me, you can say, Oh, I know someone. Visit TurboTax.com to match with your expert today. It's only available with TurboTax Full Service Experts. The real-time updates are only in the iOS mobile app.

Michael Kwanuka is a singer-songwriter from London. His second album, Love and Hate, came out in 2016 and was named one of the best albums of the year from the BBC, NME, The Guardian, G. and more. One of the songs on the album was used as the theme for the hit HBO series Big Little Lies. And in this episode, Michael breaks down the song Black Man in a White World. He talks about how the song began, where it came from, and what the title means.

My name's Michael Kuwanuka and I'm a singer songwriter from London. The song started in the studio around November time, 2014. I've only done two albums of this. It's on the second album that's come out, Love and Hate. I'd done the first album and I was struggling to make the second album. I'd written all these songs, made what I thought was an album, listened to it back, and decided it wasn't good enough. It was missing that excitement that you want to hear off an album.

So I was really dejected and stopped. making music really. I just thought maybe the first album was just luck. It was the first few songs I wrote and they worked, but now it's come down to it. I just don't have the ability. Everything doesn't sound good. I kept sending things in to the label. They were like Yeah, it's all right, but it's not really happening. And uh and I knew it deep down.

And I was just kind of sitting around so my manager was like, Why don't you work with Inflow? And I was like, Who's Inflow? It's like, She's good and I hadn't collaborated very much with other producers or co written really that much. So I said, Well, I'm not doing anything and nothing's happening and

It's not like I've got any options. So we met in central London and we just talked for like a couple of hours and I was thought this guy's really cool and seemed like a nice person, so let's go in the studio. But I was really, really

down and I would sometimes flow would call and be like, Let's go to the studio and I just wouldn't turn up. I just couldn't face being in in a studio and listening to music that wasn't good enough all the time. It's like this is just depressing'cause it was like I haven't written a good song in years. It feels like years and but then on like the fourth day of being in the studio every day, I just w had my acoustic and I started playing some chords, like country style bluesy chords.

And Flo was in the other room and he was like, what's that? Sounds pretty cool. I knew straight away that there was something to it. When I got signed and started making music professionally is the first time people say, well you're this or well you're that. You should be doing this kind of music. And every time I send a demo in or like a tracking, an AR guy would be like, you know, you're not gonna sing a country song. So that used to really rile me up because I felt like being black was like

stopped me from being a successful artist because I thought, well if I was white, you know, I'd be able to do country music because it would fit. It would be like, oh yeah, he looks like that. It fit. So I had this feeling of like, you don't fit. So I thought, well, let's get rid of the acoustic guitar country lick. I said to Flo

I've been listening recently to Sunhouse, the early blues music and there's this one Sun House song, Don't Mind People Grinning in Your Face, and he's just singing and clapping. The whole song is just singing and clapping. Any of these over this in mind, a true friend is hard to find.

So we just started clapping and I just started singing. Yeah. We had no chords and I just started singing the verse. I've been so And then we listened to it back and it just sounded good just like that. We thought wow this is exciting. We stacked up the choruses for I'm a black man and doubled it and I did some harmonies on it. And um Flo went into the live room and played a bass drum, just three beats. I feel that

And we've gone as far as we can without any chords or anything. So I just picked up a electric guitar and plugged it straight into the desk. But we had no amps so like we just plugged into the desk. And I was thinking of like Mayfield tunes or the way people played on those like seventies records. I just obsessed with that still. The guitar's so cool and exciting, but it's smooth as well and clean.

I wanted something like that, so I picked up the guitar and then just found the key and then just played a G and an A. So I'll just plug that straight into the desk as well and just follow the guitar. And then that's all we had. That was like a space of half an hour, 45 minutes.

I felt validated, you know. I felt some affirmation just in within myself and my emotion'cause I was like, I haven't been this excited about something I'm creating for so long, you know. So it was a really big moment, like, maybe I can do it, you know. But what was holding me back was the lyric. I'm a black man in a white world. But I can't sing that. I can't sing I'm a black man in a white world. Most of

the people that come to my gigs, there's not really that many black people that come to the shows. So what what would they think if you if I put this out on an album or released it as a song? Would people think I just hate white people, you know? So all this fear kind of came in and I tried to change the words. I'm a black man and I feel down or I'm a black man in a in the wrong world or anything, you know, I was just trying to just shoehorn, you know, I could just say something else.

around what I mean, but just soften it a bit, you know, and that way no one will get upset.'Cause I was like, you know, no one's gonna listen to this. I sound like some like racist, you know, that hates white people. I just thought which it isn't, but I thought people misunderstand because it was just this repetitive like mantra, I'm a black man in the white world. But I wanna sing it because it felt so true to me

Like incredibly shrewd. Nothing had felt that clear as a lyric up until that point in terms of what I felt like at the time. for me being a black artist, doing the music that I do, it's not it doesn't really always connect with m modern black culture as such. Growing up I was always listening to Nirvana, I was listening to Green Day in my early teens. I was going to like punk festivals, watching Pennywise and it would be like none of these bands have

Black guys in it. Because of where I grew up, Muswell Hill, there was no real black family. So my all with my environment, all my influences were from kind of middle class. white backgrounds, but my family uh Ugandans and everyone had two cars, we didn't have any cars. We had like different foods. When friends came round to stay, it would be like, Oh, we don't find my place strange, you know, we don't we we eat like Ugandan food so You know, all these things.

So I I was always like, I don't fit and on top of that, the music industry and the struggles of just like people trying to put you in a box. So back to the lyric. The feeling was like half acceptance to myself and two just declaring like, well this is it then. That's what you see me. I'm a black man in a white world. So that's it, that's what I'm supposed to be. Cool. Sometimes it annoys me, sometimes I get down about it. But at the same time, good, you know, you said that, I'm gonna say it too.

But then after that we just had this demo for like a year and we couldn't finish the song because every time we tried things it just ruined the excitement that we had at the beginning. We tried to re record it with the proper band, but we just couldn't get what we w wanted. We couldn't replicate that excitement. And we realized at the time the reason why we were losing the energy of it was that we were trying to fix all the mistakes like the out of tune base.

And the tempo just goes up and down. It's not to a click. It's just so all over the place. Then Flo and I realised when we were back in London and it was like, well, maybe we just play to the demo. and extend that'cause that's got the excitement. I will have to get a drummer to just play through the weird tempo changes that happened. And so I called my friend Graham up, who's a drummer. We said, We've got this track, can you play drums on it? So he came to a studio in London

And we just kept paying the track. I'm a black man It's like his second beat he came up with just fitted the song and kept the excitement there but elevated it. The beat that he had was like this fella cootie style beat, afro beat feel. And so Flo and I looked at each other like, wow, this sounds And um he also brought Chongas along. Sorry about Congo plot down, put some precaution in it. Some other sounds that we hadn't heard before.

I mean Graham went for it, Graham just started playing shakers. I mean he played everything under the sun that you had in these percussion boards. And then we need to do some back and vocals. Those were done in London by three great singers. They come from like church backgrounds so they can sing, like really, really sing. I just had the idea to have this sound that goes

Just to shock people in the verse. So I sing before that. I'm in love. And so I just said sing love straight away after that. I'm in love. But I'm still sad. I like a bullet to shock someone. And then knights as well. Nights. Later on in one of the verses, there are these R's that they do too. There's overdrive distortion on the vocal tomorrow. So there's like a crunch to it. I love that stuff.

And then there was this engineer that assistant engineer that was at the studio and uh he's got this really low voice. He just starts talking and he's like, Man, your voice is low And Flo had the idea, he turned round and was like, I wonder what it would sound like if after the breakdown the assistant sings Underneath My Harmonies.

I'm a black man in the white world to give an extra lift because he's got this really low voice that we couldn't get down to with a real strong character. So he asked him and he was like, Well, I'm not a singer, I'm not a musician. You want me to sing on this track? And he was like, Yeah. And it sounded amazing. I'm a black man. And then we wanted to put some like string quartets and soulful string parts on a lot of the songs, which is the fun part near the end of a record.

But I decided not to put strings on Batman and the White World. I thought it's not really that kind of lush, kind of mid tempo soul song. This is more exciting, so I don't want to take away from that to have like this really pretty string sound on top of it. Flo knows this lady called Rosie Danvers who does streams for a lot of artists like Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Adele, stuff like that. So she's like the go to. So Rosie's in the studio, we we play her all the tracks on the album.

But I leave out black man in the white world. But she hears it'cause she's the end of the day. She's like, What's this? you know. I thought it's a song Black Man and White World. But I don't really want strings on it. So he was like, well let me just try something. So I said, cool, you know, we can just try it. And if you don't like it, you can just take it out. And they play these really nice, long notes over the

I thought that's pretty, that's cool, but that's what I expected. But then the drop came. And this was one of my favourite parts of the song. It was like the icing, the cherry on the cake. And at that point it was like the song's done. I used to be just really upset with just group that would look like someone that looked like me and I just was desperate to fit in When we would go to Uganda it would be like

There's this word in Muganda which is Mizungu, but it basically means foreigner or white person. So they'll call me and my brother a Mizungu'cause we were like chubby than everyone, like didn't speak Luganda, we had different kinds of clothes.

And it'd be like Mzungu, Mzungu. And I was like, Don't call me that, man. I'm like, I'm English, but I'm not white, you know. And then, but then when I would be in England, it would be like, Well, you're black, you know. So I was just in the middle of nowhere. And and I hated it. And I wanted to sing about that, and it came out in this So

I'm glad that's the lyric. I realised how much of a a blessing it is to not fit in. You can relate to different things that people don't really understand. And then I'd listen to my favourite artists and I realised they all kind of had that in some way. So for me this song represents all of that eureka moment of like, oh right, okay, this is like actually incredible that I get to be a bit different and I'm so lucky that I grew up in Marswell Hill.

You know, I'm so lucky that my parents are Ugandan, I'm so lucky that I'm black.

And now, here's Black Man in a White World by Michael Kuanuka in its entirety. I've been I've got nothing left to play I've got nothing Let's see. Visit songexploder.net for a link to buy this track and to learn more about Michael Cuanuka, and to watch the award winning music video for Black Man in a White World.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April twenty-fourth. It's been about fifteen years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikeshi Herway. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it may be completely

My way of writing songs, and this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions. including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast. Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Fenn Lilly and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm

We'll begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Simeen Nosrat, Jason Manzukis, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee, Ken Jen. John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. And get tickets for the shows on my website rishices.co or just go to Slash Love.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Thanks to Shopify for their support of Song Exploder. When I first started the podcast, it seemed like I had to figure out everything on my own, booking interviews, making the artwork, making the website, and every day there was a new question that needed an answer. When you're starting something new, finding the right tool to help you out and simplify everything can be a game changer. And for millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and ten percent of all e commerce in the US. You can tackle so many important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. It'll make your life easier and your business operations smoother. So start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start getting new sales.

Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at Shopify dot com slash song exploder. Go to shopify dot com slash song exploder. Again, that's shopify dot com slash song exploder. Song Exploder is sponsored by DistroKid. If you're an independent artist, DistroKit is a great way to get your music distributed. You get unlimited uploads, and you get to keep 100% of your royalties and earnings.

There are more than a million artists, including me, who have used DistroKid to get their music into all the major streaming services. Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, everywhere. The DistroKid app is now available on iOS and Android. Go to the app or Play Store to download it now. And for 10% off your first year's membership, go to distrokid.com slash VIP slash song exploder.

Thanks to Wayfair for their supportive Song Exploder. They have everything you need for your house or your apartment or wherever you live. I was just going through my old emails to look up all the stuff that I've gotten from Wayfair over the years. And even I'm surprised by how wide the range is. The first thing I ever got was a laundry bag. and then an outdoor light for my front door.

And more recently, I've gotten a couple rugs, a circular rug for under my dining table and one for outdoors. Right now in my cart, I've got these expandable bamboo dividers so that I can organize my dresser drawers. Honestly, you can find so much stuff there. And coming up, they've got Wayday, which is the sale to shop the best deals in home. We're talking up to 80% off with fast and free shipping on everything.

So head to Wayfair.com from April 25th through April 27th to shop Wayday. That's W-A-Y-F A-I-R dot com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. Next time on Song Exploder, Alt J. Song Exploder is produced by me along with Christian Kuhnz. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by the Knight Foundation and by listeners like you.

Learn more at radiotopia.fm. You can find Song Exploder on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at SongExploder, and you can find all the past and future episodes of the show at Songexploder.net or wherever you download podcasts. My name is Rishi K Shiroi. Thanks for listening. Blood.