Coup de coeur: the durable beauty of Michael Kiwanuka

Michael Kiwanuka’s music endures. On his latest album Small changes, he strips his sound to its warmest essence. In Brussels, his gentle yet defiant voice takes center stage.

“I’m going for durable beauty,” Michael Kiwanuka told me more than ten years ago. He was coming to Brussels to throw his first album to the lions, and gently explained why he was so fascinated by the songs of artists who had preceded him long ago, such as Van Morrison and Bill Withers. “You can just keep listening to that music,” he said. “Compare it to Pelé: he himself is getting old, but his game will always be fun to watch.”

Ten years on, Pelé is dead, but Kiwanuka’s beauty has proven to be durable. With gentle circumspection, he has released four albums, as if he was picking fluff from his belly button. On Small Changes, which appeared at the end of last year, he swapped the psychedelic grandeur he had come to embrace for warm folk-soul in which you could read stories about hope in a world on the brink.

IKEA

Michael Kiwanuka grew up in Muswell Hill, a predominantly white, middle-class area of North London. His parents didn’t listen to music; they didn’t even own a CD player. As a black artist with an acoustic guitar, he long felt like an outsider, but in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz, he saw his love for both black and white music united.

The “black man in a white world” has become a recurring theme in his work. A thread he also picked up when he appeared in an old IKEA in London, at the only concert to date by SAULT, the mysterious band helmed by Kiwanuka’s go-to producer Inflo, at the end of 2023. “Colour blind,” I heard him singing with his warm, soft voice from behind a muffled glass wall, “I can see it in your eyes tonight / There’s no difference between you and I / Everything will be alright.”