Part 2

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

Most often an opening line of a verse will come to me - the sacred inspired thought. I then tend to jump to the chorus and figure out what the heart of the song is about. Once that feels good, I go back to the first verse and flesh it out and then move on to the second and from there decide if the form will follow a more traditional route with a bridge or perhaps take a different form.

My song ‘Blue’ started out this way and in the end only had two verses, no bridge. The lyric is pretty transparent and I expressed all that I needed to within two verses and a couple of choruses.



It’s not a hard and fast formula. Occasionally an entire lyric top to bottom will flow from me in an improvisation and I’ll do a few minor adjustments. But generally speaking, it’s a process of discovery that unfolds from a single line.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

I think an album can create a context in which a song can mean more than it does on its own.

With New Roots, the songs are connected by a personal, historical and emotional journey. They don't all need to tell the same story, but they need to belong to the same world.

Sometimes a song can even contradict another song and that's interesting to me, because as people we are full of contradictions. If you imagine an album like a body, all the parts a strengthened by working as a whole and in some cases wouldn’t work at all individually.

My song ‘You Can Have Everything’ from the album is very much the odd child - lol but it most certainly relates to the dream my grandparents had when coming over to the UK as part of the Windrush Generation.



I don't think an album should be too neat. Life isn't neat. You can feel incredibly strong one day and completely uncertain the next. You can be grieving something and celebrating something else simultaneously. So I think consistency of emotional truth matters more to me than consistency of narrative.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

Definitely. The voice is an instrument, so the physical experience of singing a word matters enormously. There are words that look beautiful on the page but don't feel good in the mouth. There are also words that have a particular vowel, consonant or rhythm that suddenly unlocks something vocally. I'm very sensitive to the sound of language. Not just what a word means, but how it feels to sing.

When I'm singing my own work, the voice and lyric have developed together, so there is usually a very instinctive relationship between them. Singing someone else's song can be fascinating because you have to find your way into someone else's emotional architecture. You have to make their words truthful in your own body.

I tend to only adopt other people’s songs into my set when I’ve found a strong emotional connection to the meaning and lyric. Musically I can re-harmonise it or create a new rhythm or groove to support that, but I have to connect to the meaning first and then I translate it to physically feel and sound right for me.

The Police’s ‘Roxanne’ has been a prime example for me of where I’ve done that. It was the first song I felt ownership of in that way. I had truly made it my own.



I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

Yes, and I actually really enjoy that aspect of releasing music.

Once a song leaves you, you no longer own its meaning. People bring their own lives to it. I've had people tell me what a song meant to them and realised that they had heard something I hadn't consciously put there.

I don't necessarily see those interpretations as misunderstandings. Sometimes they're simply another truth. I’m thinking in particular of my song ‘Black Panther’.



It was written from the perspective of one of my enslaved great great great grandmothers to her slave master and people have asked me to sing them down the aisle at the wedding to that song! Lol! It’s incredible how a lyric can have a two-tone meaning. For them it was a love song and for me it was a opportunity to connect to my ancestry.

I think that's one of the great privileges of being a songwriter: you make something from a very particular place in yourself, and then somebody else finds themselves in it. The song becomes bigger than the circumstances that created it.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing song lyrics or poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I love this question because I don't actually think the distinction is as clear as we sometimes make it.

Making a great cup of coffee can be creative. Cooking can be creative. The way you arrange a room, dress yourself, make a garden — all of these things can be forms of expression.

Perhaps what is different about songwriting for me is that it allows me to communicate with a kind of emotional specificity that I might not otherwise access. I can take something intangible and give it a shape.

But I also think the so-called mundane parts of life feed the music. Making coffee, walking, cooking, travelling on a train — those are the moments when your mind wanders and connections happen. Creativity doesn't only occur when you're sitting down to create.