Self Titled
Kae Tempest says that *Self Titled* is a record borne out of synchronicity. The South Londoner is a master of many arts—he’s a rapper, poet, spoken word act, novelist, and more—but something didn’t feel right as he approached making what he thought would be his fifth solo album. Seeking an outside take on it, Tempest played some of the songs to Fraser T. Smith, with whom he’d collaborated on the Dave and Adele producer’s Future Utopia project, and Smith’s feedback opened up a whole new way forward. “He just said, ‘This isn’t right for right now, this just isn’t quite it, there’s something else I think that needs to come out of you right now,’” Tempest tells Apple Music. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just park this and come into the studio and let’s see what happens?’” What happened is *Self Titled*, a career peak that takes in menacing hip-hop grooves, jubilant, expansive pop, jagged beats, and bombastic soundscapes. By some margin, it is Tempest’s most ambitious musical work to date. Working with Smith unlocked something. “It brought out the bigness of my sound, my intentionality around songwriting, wanting to be more concise, more driven, wanting bigger sound,” Tempest says. “Fraser is a big songwriter.” The process of making the record, he explains, felt like being swept up in a strong current. “We were just going with it, and the minute we tried to lead and not flow, it wouldn’t quite work. If I tried to get something to happen, it just wouldn’t happen.” *Self Titled* is very much the album that Kae Tempest was meant to make right now. Let Tempest guide you through it, track by track. **“I Stand on the Line”** “This is a statement piece. It’s huge. The orchestral instrumentation, the expansiveness of the sound and the production. This was that moment when I said to Fraser, ‘I want big sound. I want to make big songs,’ and this was his response. Lyrically, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. My natural place when I’m writing lyrics is to write from character perspectives or zoom in on one very specific thing but retain some kind of abstract relationship with the object of the poem or the lyric. But with this, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. I realized this is what appeals to me in songs, when you get this insight into somebody’s truth.” **“Statue in the Square”** “I was wondering whether to follow ‘I Stand on the Line’ with this because, in some ways, they tread some of the same ground lyrically, but in other ways, it’s a one-two punch that is so satisfying. I played Fraser Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ and Run The Jewels. I was like, ‘I just want something so simple, but I want it to be so big, but so clear in each of its parts.’ I liked the idea of creating something on the piano that felt like an old loop but we’re just playing it now in the room. Lyrically, the first draft went on for ages and ages. The verses were really long, but the chorus jumped out and I thought, ‘OK, I know what this song wants me to do now, I just have to minimize and reduce and distill what I’m saying.’” **“Know Yourself”** “In my late teenage years, I was going through some heavy stuff, I felt at a bit of a crossroads. What I understood to be my older self came into my head and basically instructed my younger self to keep writing, to focus on creativity rather than destruction, and to know myself. That older self was what I understood my lyrics were coming from. Each time I wrote lyrics, it was advice I was getting from my older self. As I got older, I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I haven’t gone back, so who the fuck was that?’ Writing ‘Know Yourself,’ I was like, ‘This is the moment, this is when I went back,’ and it’s because that kid did what they did, that I can do what I’m doing. Fraser said, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ because he wrote this beat with Tom Rowlands from The Chemical Brothers. They went to school together but they didn’t see each other for 30 years. Tom went to Fraser’s house, they talked about their lives for about 10 minutes, then Fraser picks up a guitar, Tom’s on a drum machine. He said it was like, ‘Suddenly we’re 15 again.’ So lyrically, I’m talking to my younger self, musically, Fraser’s talking to his younger self.” **“Sunshine on Catford”** “I feel very strongly about dynamic and pace and gradient, I love to position albums and live shows, the journey of it all is very important. The idea is that once you know yourself, then you can know love and then in comes this beautiful love song, it’s like a thank you. It’s just a little gratitude prayer to a beautiful moment. We were blessed with the vocal of the fairy godfather of the album who came and sprinkled a bit of magic Pet Shop Boys dust on the record \[Neil Tennant is a guest vocalist on the track\]. This is a hymn of thanks to the small moments when you are trying to make a life with someone, when things just feel great.” **“Bless the Bold Future”** “The lyric began years ago. I always set myself this rule that I mustn’t write backwards because I thought if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to go forwards. I always went into the studio with a blank notebook and started from wherever I was at. After writing ‘Know Yourself’ and going back and sampling \[an\] old lyric, I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this is the moment where I can go back into older material with this new perspective.’ This lyric had been floating around and I couldn’t let go of it. There was something about it that I thought was interesting. It never quite found its home before, then we found this fucking absolutely rolling monster beat. It was beautiful.” **“Everything All Together”** “In my live show, I like to take a line from each of the songs at some point in the set and weave them all together and start repeating things that people have heard before. It gives this cumulative trance-like power to the whole experience. As the album was finished, I was saying to Fraser, ‘I want to make this kind of master poem,’ so I took a line from each of the songs and wove them together. We got all the session files up and took the horn line from that song, the snare from that song, one little piano part from that song, so there’s something from every single song and we put it on a grid almost like it was artwork rather than music work. We did it by eye rather than listening to it and then pressed play on that loop. It’s like the soul of the album speaking. It tells you everything that you’ve just heard and everything you’re about to hear.” **“Prayers to Whisper”** “This came out of me experimenting with form, four lines and the repeated fifth line three times. Obviously, it’s about something that’s close to my heart, the death of a friend. The chords Fraser found for it were quite somber. I was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ Lyrically and musically, if the two things are going the same way, it’s death. We need uplift in the music. We need celebration. Fraser found these beautiful chords and it felt massive. It felt anthemic, which is how you want it to feel. It’s tough to feel optimistic in the face of somebody leaving, but there is this push and pull, if you lose somebody to something where they were suffering, to illness, to something painful, then there is some sense of release. I wanted the music to embody that and then it became this huge ballad, big pop song.” **“Diagnoses”** “I wanted to make something playful, celebratory, a summer banger about fucking antipsychotics and HRT. Why the fuck not? That’s your life. You still want to fucking dance. You’re still dancing. It’s another example of the lyric and the music pushing against each other. That’s what creates the good feeling. That’s what I like. It’s like, if this is your life, it’s no big deal. It’s a massive deal. You’re fucked. Life is just mental, of course. But at the same time, it’s just your life. And we are all just dealing with the fallout of what we’re in.” **“Hyperdistillation”** “I loved the beat but I was struggling to find the lyrical shape. It’s a love song to London, to my city, and there were these little hooky moments and I was like, ‘I need something in that hook.’ I went to Raven Bush, the string player from Speakers Corner Quartet, and said, ‘Can you write me a violin line that almost sounds like a soaring melody, like a vocal hook?’ He wrote this beautiful string part. It’s amazing, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more of an uplift. Then I remembered \[singer-songwriter\] Connie Constance, who I’d bumped into a few times backstage and who I just love. She came down to the studio and wrote this amazing part. These fractured pieces suddenly came together in this perfect moment, which is what the song’s about.” **“Forever”** “This started as a love song about the uncertainty of a relationship and having this idea that let’s just fucking enjoy this for all that it is. And then Fraser was saying, ‘I know I was encouraging you to tell your story, but actually I feel like now the album needs more of your outward perspective.’ I totally agreed but I’d grown attached to that hook. If I tried to write a song about the world, I would never have written a hook so tender. The way that hook is addressed to a lover enables it to be more honest and truthful about the world, you escape the narrative trap of ‘I’m going to write a song about everything, which means you can write a song about nothing.’” **“Breathe”** “This is when I knew that the album wanted to be born. This was when Fraser had said to me, ‘Tell your story.’ I loved the beat, I wrote it, scribbled it out, went in the studio. This is the first time I did it. I could barely read the paper, my hands were shaking, and it is like a freestyle, wrote it, rapped it, that’s it. I haven’t quite got my head around what it is that I’m even trying to say, but the rush of that feeling, it is irreplaceable. Getting Young Fathers on there was amazing because within the world of that song I’m talking about, when *Everybody Down* \[Tempest’s 2014 Mercury-nominated debut\] came out, they were there, we were labelmates. They’ve been a part of this journey and it felt like a massive blessing to have them there on this song.” **“Till Morning”** “I wanted it to feel like the morning was coming, the sun was coming out, it was getting warmer, it’s getting brighter. When the chords come in at the end, it’s like the light. By the time we’d got our heads around that arrangement, it was two in the morning. I went in to put the vocal on it and I’d been metabolizing the lyric quite a lot and the take that I did was quite angry. Fraser said there was a tenderness in the original guide vocal because I was being very tentative with it. Sometimes, when something’s really new, you don’t even dare to say it, so I went back in and I did it like that. More gentle, more optimistic, more hopeful, more loving, less raging—and what you get is this very beautiful song about survival and about what comes after, about the possibility, a declaration of love. I thought, ‘How lucky I am to have met Fraser and to be in this relationship with somebody who can give a note like that, that can just shine a light on your performance?’”
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