Song Exploder - Mustafa - Air Forces

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Mustafa is a singer, songwriter, and poet from Toronto. He gained national recognition in Canada for his poetry. in 2016, he served on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Youth Advisory Council. Later, as a songwriter, he contributed to the Grammy award-winning album Starboy by The Weeknd, and he’s written songs for Usher, Camila Cabello, and others. In May 2021, he released his own debut album, called When Smoke Rises, inspired by his experiences losing friends to inner-city violence. His album’s been critically acclaimed, and it was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize. I spoke to Mustafa about his song "Air Forces," a track he made with his longtime collaborator, Grammy-winning producer Frank Dukes, plus Swedish artist Simon on the Moon, and Jamie xx. For more visit, songexploder.net/mustafa.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Mustafa is a singer, songwriter, and poet from Toronto. He gained national recognition in Canada for his poetry. In 2016, he served on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Youth Advisory Council. As a songwriter, he contributed to the Grammy Award-winning album, Starboy, by the weekend, and he's written songs for Usher, Camilla Cabo, and others. In May 2021, he released his own debut album, called When Smoke Rises,

inspired by his experiences losing friends to inner-city violence. His album's been critically acclaimed, and it was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize. I spoke to Mustafa about his song Air Forces. It's a track he made with his longtime collaborator, Grammy-winning producer Frank Dukes, plus Swedish artist Simon on the Moon and Jamie Axax. Here's Mustafa on Song Exploder. My name is Mustafa Ahmed. I was raised in Regent Park.

It's the first and largest housing project in Canada. It's right at the center of downtown Toronto, a short walk away from the busiest intersection in Canada. Yeah, it's a community, like any conventional hood. You know, there's like systemic barriers, education barriers, not a lot of open roads, but that made for the closeness of community that you just didn't get elsewhere.

My life before the record was incredibly immersed in how I was going to preserve the stories of my community. And I remember when Air Forces came to me. I was editing this short film on violence in the city, and I interviewed people from communities that we have been at war with for years, in communities that are, like, practically mirrors of mine. and people just like me that are experiencing the same kind of grief that I'm experiencing,

but it was hard for me to familiarize with them at all, you know, because of this territorial warfare. But what happened was when I was working on the short film, I interviewed people, and I was able to ask them a simple question of how they want to be remembered when they're no longer here and how they want their friends to be remembered. I just wanted to remember me by, like, I'm my brother's keeper, like, you know what I mean? And I'm always somebody that is going to be there for the next man or be there for my sister, be there for my mother, you know what I mean? I want to be remembered as somebody that's somebody that left the good mark on them, not just the negative vibe,

just something that they can take from and say, you know, what at least he achieves, something that we can have. And it's longer than him. And I was looking at like the faces and the interviews of people from communities like mine, and looking at their softness and their sensitivity coming out as they answer the question of how they want to be remembered. And in that, I found a kind of empathy that I think I was bereft of. And a lot of the rage that I felt and the frustrations I felt about the system and about other people

that have inflicted harm on my community, when that rage started to dissipate, that's when I was able to approach that song. I actually have the original Air Forces vocal recording that I recorded on my phone. They'll take the morning with you and sick of father children. I don't want nothing about these times. I remember sat in the studio with my friend Simon Hesman. We were listening to a lot of Nick Drake, just trying to like immerse myself in folk songs that I loved.

After that, we just started like writing chords. The first thing that came to me was, don't crease your air forces, just stay inside tonight. Don't crease your air forces, just stay home this time. You know what happens during these nights. Those are the words that came to me, and then I knew that I was like exploring something honest, you know.

But I'm going anywhere. If they take me, they... Simon, he dressed as like a, a beautiful human being and so it was easy to like be open with him and to make mistakes before him. I was with my manager in London and I played him this song and he was like, well, we have to bring Simon to London and we just wrote songs together every day and slowly the project came together. I just took on the perspective of like the caregiver and it is a thought of that comes to me all the time, but I was really thinking about the mothers and the community

and the kind of like unmanageable weight that they feel when their sons step out into a world that they know was not built or designed to protect them. And then I was like, okay, I have to take it further. I'm like, I want to continue to describe this person, describe the narrative by way of like maybe even material things. And so that was, I described the chain of like, you know, you say it's okay, but you tuck your chain. It's okay, but you touch your chain. Like if they take it, I won't see you for a while. It was almost like I was choosing full chords

and doing what my friends who are rappers do when they hear a beat. Because I've been in those rap sessions for so many years of my life, I was just doing the same exact thing except I was taking a different musical form and I was just like, okay, cool, let me describe my life. like, let me describe my life. Like, let me describe what's going on. Like, let me describe loss. And I tell you how I feel in case it's the last time.

You know the odds. You know the flaws. It's all about design. And you go anywhere. Though it ain't safe. Just know that I care. I'll always care and I'll be awake. The original idea I had when it was just those guitar,

parts and my voice, that's how I wanted to release the song. I kind of resisted the idea of producing the song out. But then I'm like, you know, after having some conversations, I knew that I had a responsibility to take it to a play sonically that also felt progressive. Then we just kind of filtered the guitars and then added like, you know, kind of this rhythm. Frank Dukes was the executive producer of the record.

He's like my closest collaboration. Frank Tukes, I met when I was 18 years old, and I messaged him and I said, hey, I'm like, I really admire the work that you do, and he said, you should come and meet with me. And he was nervous that I was going to come and want to do poetry, and I was nervous that he thought that I wanted to come and do poetry.

We started to explore songs together, you know. That's when I was incredibly young, and so I learned a lot from him throughout the years of just making music with him, and we wrote a lot of songs for other people together. And I was told Frank, that I wanted to tap into what the sonics of my Nubian culture was, because I think it was something that informed a lot of what the communities look like and feel like.

And I hear my mother singing these melodies and these words as she's washing dishes. And I wanted to hold on to that, and I wanted it to be a part of the narrative. So we were listening to the Sudanese songs of Burial in War. And I was like, oh, this is a lot. This is amazing because these are like the chance that would be shared when the men would return from war. And then here I am taking on a perspective of like what it feels like when young boys and girls are stepping out into the war. I thought those parallels were incredible. And so when that project came to me by way of Frank, it was like kind of inevitable that it was going to be a part of the song.

Jamie XX found a Mickey Newberry sample. I didn't even know it was Mickey Newbery when he first played it, and Mickey Newberry being such a beautiful folk singer. I was happy that we were able to weave him into the song. In the second verse, I was just exploring what our lives and our mortality and survival can look like in a community like Regent Park. To what are we even destined? Will we have wives and children?

Or is that not written for you and I? Truthfully, it's like, it doesn't matter if you're putting on the chain or if you have the gun or if you don't. It's like we're all vulnerable to state violence. We're all vulnerable to the poison of poverty, you know, and the poison of anti-blackness and so many other things. Exploring that was so necessary for me in the second verse. And all these intersections where we've been kept and left in, I wonder what God keeps us alive. When I was writing the background vocals on Air Forces,

I just wanted it to be subtle and I want it to be gentle and I just want it to feel almost like it's just lifting it textually more than anything else. And so I wonder why God keeps us alive. I wanted that to lift even in the slightest. And so that's why I chose to find like, you know, a subtle harmony there. Throughout this song, I wanted it to feel. that it was of course about this deep care that I have and this love letter that I'm writing

for my brothers in the hood, but also this letter I wrote as a reminder to myself of like the condition of this community. Just know that I care, I'll always care, and I'll be awake. I'll be awake. I've had a difficult time sleeping for years. After the burial of each friend,

you know, that insomnia continually got the best of me. got the best of me. And for so many people, it is that way. You can get a call at any given moment in the night. You just don't know if that's going to be the final call you received from someone. Frank Dukes is singing on that part of Air Forces. Of course, he filtered it and put a lot of things on his voice. It almost felt like an instrument. And so when he did that, I decided that I was going to just find a harmony over top what he did. We wanted the song to feel like It was at a climax, you know what I mean? That now, like, all the voices have kind of joined together,

you know, the voices of Nubia and my own voice. This song ends with my friend's voice, a close friend of my name Puffy, and I called him and I said, I need you to describe what the walk home feels like. You see a couple kids running around playing games, the dope boys riding around. If you step outside of your household in the hood,

most times it's like, You're walking quickly. You have to be alert. And you don't get an opportunity to, like, just appreciate the existence of your home community, you know? I could remember faintly what it was like when we were younger, because when we were younger, we were freer. And so that's when he started to describe things to me.

It's like when I walk out, you know, like I see the green box. People chilling. Right, bikes, then you see, obviously, man's coming over at the green box. Yeah, it was like an entire universe. in this open circle of like a backyard. And that's where a lot of my first experiences took place.

It was like my first time using a water gun, my first time watching my cat be outside of the home. It was little things, but it was things that I couldn't focus on later on it. And so I just wanted there to be an account of what that was from someone that lived there. After experience, experiencing the kind of traumas that I did.

The community and my idea of the community, my relationship with the community transformed completely. And I think that in the effort of even having Puffy's voice at the end, it was to try to return to what it felt like in the beginning. Just cracking jokes, kicking up. I do feel like I'm incredibly bitter sometimes, bitter about the fact that I had to write these songs.

I will never forgive the publications who announced the deaths of my friends using dated mugshots, I will never forgive them for that. The fact that people in my community, people like myself, couldn't even grieve, is something that I'm going to have to try and make peace with for the rest of my life. I'm just trying to chase as quickly and as purposefully

as I can, a humanity, if I could, when it's all said, and then, done, it's like I made myself and the people around me a little more human than maybe it wasn't all in vain. And now, here's Air Forces by Mustafa in its entirety. Learn more, visit songexploder.comnet slash Mustafa. You'll find links to buy or stream Air Forces, and you can watch the music video. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists

including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin,

and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode was produced by me with editing help from Craig Ely and Casey Deal. artwork by Carlos Lerma, production assistants from Chloe Parker, and music clearance by Kathleen Sman. Special thanks to Alec Bemis. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported,

artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the podcast at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.