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Yerba mate translate3/20/2023 ![]() ![]() I think I was too angry and stressed to fully enjoy it until I saw that it was helping other people and impacting people. Something to focus on through all the noise. It was a very stressful time, and I think making that EP was kind of like meditation for me. Was there something cathartic about releasing that EP at that moment? It was definitely an escape from the insane realities of things going on outside of our control. I think art helped a lot of people in 2020, me included. In some ways you’re very appreciative to have this happy moment of people listening to art you put out, and in another way, it just made things feel so unimportant and minuscule because there are way more pressing things to think about. It’s definitely weird, especially at a time when things were super confusing and a lot of people were struggling to have one positive thing in a world full of chaos. It must’ve been a very odd feeling, having this music that you are ready to bring to the world and then it breaks through just as you’re not allowed to tour or see people face to face. I’ve talked to a handful of artists recently who broke through at the very beginning of the pandemic. On Please Have a Seat, he sounds more confident in those experiments, and more excited to share them, than ever. There’s always something thrilling about hearing NNAMDÏ jump from experiment to experiment on an album. But even at his most accessible, he’s curious as ever, approaching every trope from an odd angle. In that sense, Please Have a Seat is an inviting record, packed with melodic choruses and pop hooks, breathless rapping, and crunchy guitars. When writing Please Have a Seat - out today via Sooper Records and Secretly Group - he set out to make each song hummable, catchy enough that he’d still be singing it to himself a few days after writing it. ![]() But it does signal something of a change in direction for the now 32-year-old singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. That’s not really a dig at his critics - Ogbonnaya identified his music as weird from the jump and, in places, it was objectively pretty weird (not least on his second LP, Feckin Weirdo). And jammed between the luxuries, there’s a moment that verges on autobiography: “Used to say that I was too weird and shit / Now they wanna take me serious.” It is, Ogbonnaya told me a few weeks back on The FADER Interview live on Amp, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on his dreams of taking his music far and wide without relinquishing control, anonymity, or day-to-day normality. But there’s a little apprehension in there too. So, yes, “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous” is fun and overblown, a slightly sickly fantasy about the type of wealth and profile that nobody ever really seems to enjoy. ![]()
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