Michael Kiwanuka connects folk music’s generational links
Indie rock singer Michael Kiwanuka’s distinctive fusion of soulful folk has earned him widespread critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase. Hailing from north London, Kiwanuka began his career as a guitarist for grime artists Chipmunk and Bashy before catching the attention of Communion Records after a performance at Kentish Town’s The Oxford. This led to a series of EPs and the release of his debut LP, Tell Me A Tale, in 2011. With a standout performance on the Pyramid Stage at this year’s Glastonbury Festival and his latest album, Small Changes, receiving glowing reviews, Kiwanuka’s psych-tinged, intimate ballads have firmly established him as a modern singer-songwriter heavyweight.
Featured in a recent episode of Amoeba Music’s ‘What’s In My Bag?’ series, Kiwanuka perused the Hollywood record store to select much-loved LPs for his figurative ‘bag’. Among picks across Miles Davis, PF Sloan, and even American bandleader Johnny Otis, two folk artists were bestowed with high praise, highlighted for their connective links between the original 1960s Green Village scene and the contemporary West Coast ‘freak-folk’.
Discussing his love for Karen Dalton‘s 1971 sophomore effort In My Own Time, Kiwanuka expressed his love for the cult, country rock LP: “Just beautiful songs and beautiful voice, unique voice,” he said. “Being a singer-songwriter, you know, always inspired by people that can express themselves in a unique way through their songs and their voice, or through other people’s songs.”
While never entering the same folk echelons as Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, numerous artists have namechecked Dalton as an influence, including Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart and Nick Cave, who described her as his “favourite female blues singer”. Dylan himself even expressed high praise for Dalton in his 2004 Chronicles: Volume One memoir: “My favourite singer…was Karen Dalton. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed… I sang with her a couple of times”.
Directly mentoring country music singer Lacy J Dalton and inspiring her to adopt Dalton’s name, Lacy told The Guardian in 2007: “Karen’s voice is a voice for the jaded ear; a combination of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Jeannie Ritchie, the Appalachian singer… When she sang about something, you believed her.”
Up next in Kiwanuka’s shopping trip was California’s Jessica Pratt. Selecting her third LP from 2019, Kiwanuka made an interesting comparison: “We have our own Karen Dalton now… I’ve loved this album, Quite Sign, for a few years… ‘This Time Around’ is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard in recent history.”
Praised for her earthy, mysterious lyricism and delicate arrangements, Pratt revealed to The Line of Best Fit the fundamental quality which underpins her work and creative intuition: “My one weird idea about art, and the world in general, is that it always comes back to ambiguity,” she said. “It seems to be at the heart of a lot of what I say about why I do things, how I do things. What I like about music is the part of it that you can’t quite explain or see or know – that mysterious element.”
Small Changes‘ retreat into a sparser sonic space away from Kiwanuka‘s gospel harmonies perhaps has been guided by Pratt’s veneration of ambiguity’s obscuring intrigue. Extolling his passion for two generations of folk and identifying the phantasmic connective tissue between them reveals a fan who truly immerses himself in the music he loves.
