Singer-songwriter AHI will release his new album – Prospect – on 5th November. Here, we interview AHI about the record, community and his perspective on genres and meaning in music.
Hello. How are you doing today – it’s two months out from the album release, so how are you feeling?
Yeah, I mean, some of these songs have been sitting out for a while. So, I guess I was ready to release this recordin April of the beginning of the pandemic. To get out now and play these songs live before the record is coming out, it’s kind of crazy when you think about it, just because album singles always take long, but this one took extremely long, some of the first iterations of these songs were from like 2018 or 2017.
That must be kind of weird, putting yourself back in the headspace from then, before we all knew what was going to happen – putting yourself back into that headspace must be strange.
Yeah, it doesn’t feel like the real world, it feels like a different reality, but the audiences are ready for us. The first few shows I did this year, we had to adjust back into enjoying it and having that appreciation for the music. Everybody wants it back.
Definitely, we all have a renewed appreciation and gratitude for music in a way. Obviously the latest track that you’ve released from the record is ‘Coldest Fire’ – can you talk a bit about that track and the evolution of it as a song to the version we have today?
Yeah, I mean, in terms of songwriting, it was the last song I wrote on the record, it almost didn’t make the record because it was my intention to release this record a lot earlier. When that didn’t happen, I went back to the writing process, and I wrote some more songs. I was trying to write something more commercial, whatever that means, it’s not a commercial song, but something more commercial than what I usually write, something more accessible to a wider audience. It also comes from a very heavy place. Around that time the George Floyd murder happened, the Black Lives Matter protests and rallies were going on all across America, all across the world. I’m a person who just kind of wants to bring people together, I want to make sure that – not in a Kumbaya kind of way – but I believe my purpose in life is to heal people. All my life, I’ve been that person to connect people from different races, I don’t think of it – I’m very aware of my blackness, very aware of my heritage, but I’ve had black friends, white friends, Asian friends, Indian friends. I was with the cool kids, I was with the nerdy kids. I was just looking at all encompassing people. That’s always been who I am, so when the Black Lives Matter stuff came out, I was touring with a Christian artist named Lauren Daigle and we did a lot of Southern American shows – that fan base was growing. So, I’m a Christian but I don’t consider myself a Christian artist, I just make music, but I was just honoured to be on this tour.
I have an audience who sees the humanitarian side of me. I felt like I was stuck in this space where it’s okay if I don’t speak up about these protests, then there’s this audience who is going to ask why I’m not speaking up. If I do speak up about this, there’s a side of the audience who are going to ask why I am – it felt like a weird space. I’ll give you one example – I made a post with a police officer holding hands with a black guy and I said, ‘the more of this we see, the less of this we’ll see’ and the other picture was Derek Chauvin on top of George Floyd. I felt like people mostly got it, but then there’s a subset of my audience who were using it as an escape from the reality that was going on, they were using me as a sounding board. Somebody said to me ‘we should pray for the police officer’ and that really triggered me. Before writing my response, my wife was just like ‘leave it alone, you don’t need to engage people like that.’ I can’t always just be the peaceful guy, there are things that you have to stand on and that song came out of the idea that if I don’t say something, these people are gonna attack me if I do say something. We’re in a space and that’s the world we live in right now, we’re so politicised – especially in America – and the different sides are so sensitive. We’re not really divided like we are on social media, most people will have a real conversation with you – most people will listen to you in public.
I think the line in the song that strikes me the most is ‘come here darling, hold me. I’m in the coldest fire.’ Living in this duality as a black male who works in the Americana-country, folk music space, I’ve always been that single black male growing up in school, my wife and my family became my comfort in that time. You got to stand with me. You got to be with me in this life, so I look to them for that comfort. If people questioned why I haven’t said Black Lives Matter, well, I have four beautiful black children and I raised them to understand that their lives matter. For me, I don’t need to go out and chat about it, I tell people that I’m too proud to be tell somebody else that my life matters. I’ll just live like it matters.
Do you find that that perception of community and the way you view then it as all-encompassing comes from traveling all around and experiencing different cultures and meeting different people with different backgrounds?
Absolutely. One of the biggest experiences of my life was when I was backpacking across Ethiopia, I just threw myself into Ethiopia for a month, I knew about three people and had no accommodation when I landed and had to figure it out. When I got there, it was almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I think what I learned from that trip is that ultimately people are good and they want to see everybody safe, healthy, well-fed. At the core of it, people want that. There are people that were taking care of me, their people were looking out for me that didn’t have to look out for me. Obviously there’s people in the world who are going to try to take advantage, but oftentimes that comes from a circumstance, there’s very few people that are just pure unadulterated evil – someone might be trying to rob you because they’re trying to feed themselves or they’re in a bad situation, or maybe they’re over-leveraged somewhere, and they need money. I think just seeing people from all over the world and experiencing the kindness of strangers gives you hope. I love our differences, I think we should be be respectful of our differences and appreciate our differences and honour them. At the core of our humanity, at the core of our essence and our soul, I think we’re all the same.
It’s slightly hopeful – not everyone has the same experiences, but at the end of the day we’ve all gone through the last year and have come out with hope for the future.
Yeah, COVID hit and it didn’t knock on your door and say, ‘Hey, are you African American? I’ll skip you today.’ In the past, today didn’t happen, it just kind of shows something like a virus that says ‘oh, we’re all very fallible. We’re all very human’. It could stop everybody’s life in an instant.
With this record coming out and talking about that sense of community being so important to you, what do you want fans to take away from this album?
So, the first thing that always comes up is ‘honesty’ – it’s an honest record. I’m not saying that people aren’t making honest music anymore, but the idea of someone just putting themselves out there, and putting real genuine stuff out there, I think a lot of things are manufactured and fabricated to create a story or to appeal this demographic. This is just an honest record. I think everybody who worked on it just brought out very honest approach to it. The title is Prospect and every song on this record is about relationships – it’s such a simple thing, but thinking about how people’s relationships have affected my life, whether it’s my wife or in the song ‘Danger.’ That track is about this lady I dreamt about, I didn’t know who she was and then I met her in real life, and she ended up being real – I still message back and forth every day. Those I would call them almost mystical connections. Prospect to me is what I’ve come to learn because sometimes artists will make titles for songs or have lyrics and they don’t know what they mean fully until later on. We’re all the prospect in this life, so you’re sitting in this heavy concept, but you’re sitting in the middle of everything, you’re sitting in the middle of the of the future, you’re sitting right in the middle, all the way back, all the people that came before you, what if they were relying on you to fulfil your highest potential to fulfil your purpose. With that level of responsibility, I think we’d all be more accountable to one another, I think we don’t know each other better. We’d all just live with a greater sense of purpose – that’s a heavier way of looking at it.
So, I want to get people that reassurance and that hope that your life is meaningful, the relationships you make are meaningful. Before I met my wife, I was a wandering cat, backpacking across the world and meeting her gave me a renewed sense of purpose and understanding. It’s a crazy thought how we’re connected to each other. I think sometimes we work in the hustle and bustle, where I’ll try to survive or I’ll try to pay the rent or I’ll try to buy the new thing and we forget about those connections we may have missed and how miraculous they are – just simple things like meeting your spouse or meeting your best friend. My goal is to distill those feelings and those ideas into very simple, honest ideas.
I love that idea and goal, everyone needs that reminder and that gratitude. Well, congratulations on this record and thank you for your time today.
Pre-order Prospect here now.
