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“Love is harder than war,” says A&M/Octone recording artist K’NAAN,
explaining the direction he takes on his new album, Country, God
Or The Girl. “I’ve had the chance to write about my experiences
in a difficult and violent life. But when the suffering and the pain
is something that comes from within me, it’s harder to react and to
write about that.”
With his new songs—including the album’s irresistible, empathetic
first single, “Is There Anybody Out There?,” featuring Nelly Furtado—the
Somalian-born, Canadian-based singer and MC turns his attention to
the most universal emotions and experiences of them all: the
personal relationships which everyone struggles with and rejoices
in. At the same time, though, he never loses the greater sense of
the world that has defined him as an artist. On Country, God Or
The Girl, K’NAAN says, marks his attempt to address “the
internal wars, rather than the external ones, which I’d been
preoccupied with on my previous albums.”
The album is K’NAAN’s first full-length work since his
multi-platinum global smash single, “Wavin’ Flag.” After a remixed
version of the song was selected as Coca-Cola’s theme song for the
2010 FIFA World Cup campaign, the song reached #1 on iTunes in 18
countries around the world.
“Waving Flag’ made me more confident in how I approach music,” says
K’NAAN. “No one believed that song could reach so many people or
become such a phenomenon, which made me doubt myself a bit, because
I really thought it could touch people. So now any reaction to a
song of mine doesn’t bother me, because I think it’s more likely
that people really do hear it the way I’m hearing it.”
The enormous success of the single opened up countless doors for
K’NAAN, as reflected by the caliber and range of guests who appear
on Country, God Or The Girl, from Nas on “Nothing to Lose” to
Bono on “Bulletproof Pride,” plus appearances by Will.I.Am, Keith
Richards, and B.O.B. But it was the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour,
which traveled to 86 countries, that the singer claims made the
greatest impact on his music.
“I went to 22 countries in Africa, back to back,” he says. “Seeing
Africa to that degree freed me from having a narrow message in my
music.
“A friend told me about working in refugee camps during the Rwandan
genocide,” he continues. “When people settled into the evening,
though, nobody talked about the horrific tragedies that were
happening. They were talking about their lost loves. And that hit me
so deeply—how human beings are having the same conversations
everywhere, even in times of war and famine. Their favorite songs
are always love songs. And I wasn’t speaking to them in the place
that was most important to them.”
This focus is evident in such songs as “Hurt Me Tomorrow” (one of
several tracks produced by hit machine Ryan Tedder, who has worked
with such megastars as Beyonce and Adele) and “The Sound of My
Breaking Heart.” K’NAAN says that he hopes his lyrics offer a
perspective that has become too rare in today’s music.
“The vulnerability in a song like ‘Hurt Me Tomorrow’ is not from a
macho place, it’s about putting yourself at the mercy of someone
else’s love,” he says. “I think people are tired of hearing the same
stories on the radio, about wealthy people who are always winning.
It’s like nobody is allowed to have a bad day anymore, which I don’t
find believable or attractive at all.”
The product of a creative family, K’NAAN fled Mogadishu with his
family at age 13. After learning English, partly by immersing
himself in the classic hip-hop albums of the ‘90s, he came to
prominence in 1999 with a spoken word performance at the United
Nations that caught the attention of Senegalese superstar Youssou
N’Dour.
K’NAAN’s debut album, 2005’s
The Dusty Foot Philosopher,
won the Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year, and was nominated
for the Polaris Music Prize. He signed with A&M/Octone and released
the follow-up,
Troubadour, in 2009, which won two more Junos, for
Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year. Along the way he has
collaborated with the likes of Mary J. Blige, the Roots, Adam
Levine, Mos Def, Keane, and Damian Marley.
Beyond the expansion in the scope of his writing, K’NAAN points to
several other songs on Country, God Or The Girl as
breakthroughs of a more musical kind. “More Beautiful Than Silence”
sees him looking both back and forward. “That really goes back to
the tradition of more hard-edged street rhymes, juxtaposed with
romantic hooks—like French melodies against war-torn raps,” he says.
“Pre-Troubadour,
I was known for my unapologetic rhymes, for being able to call out a
situation without political compromise. But I didn’t have the
melodic chops to execute that, and I’m able to do both now.”
Celebrated for his dynamic live performances, K’NAAN feels that one
song truly captures that side of his work in a new way. “I think
‘The Seed’ gets that sound of mine that’s so hard to describe—it’s
like punk-rock reggae, with lyrics that are direct, where the story
follows a chronology. It feels like you’re in front of me on stage,
like a real experience of my show, and it’s the first time I’ve been
able to record that feeling in a song.”
On Country, God Or The Girl, K’NAAN offers a vision in which
the personal is the political, but the personal is also the
personal. “Being known for my consciousness and activism can be
limiting,” he says. “I do care about the state of the world, but
it’s no less true that I care about love and betrayal, heartbreak
and pain and loyalty. It’s dishonest to ignore parts of yourself
just to sustain the idea that people have of you. It would be
comfortable for me to just write about politics and consciousness
and stay where my fans know me. But to progress musically, I had to
open myself up.”
At the same time, though, he warns against the idea that music is
something that can be controlled, that it’s possible for any of his
work to be fully planned or calculated. “Music is so far beyond the
ideas that we have of it,” says K’NAAN. “It’s a mistake to think you
can create music. The true thing is that it reveals itself to you,
and you’re lucky to witness that.”
Links:
K'naan's Web Site
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