Ethiopian-American Singer Wayna

Looks Within on New Album,

‘The Expats’

By Paula Adhiambo Rogo

“This album is a departure of what you know of me,” Grammy-nominated singer Wayna announced to her audience of family, friends and industry folk during her listening party for the recently released “The Expats” album

The Ethiopian-born, Washington D.C.-based songstress chose to take a different direction with the creation and sound of the album after a wake-up conversation with a music industry executive who questioned her authenticity as an artist. Working with a team of producers in Toronto, what resulted was a very personal and self-exploratory album that pulls from numerous world-wide influences. AfriPOP! sat down with Wayna to discuss the personal nature of the album, her embrace of the “world” genre to label her music, and how she created an album that she describes as “Fela meets Radiohead”.

AfriPop: When introducing your album at your listening party, you talked about a conversation you had with an industry exec that really changed how you chose to pursue the album that ended up being “The Expats.” Can you tell me more about that?

Wayna: It was one of those moment-of-truth meetings. I respected this person’s opinion. It was [a conversation] I hoped would allow me to do something great. And you know when someone tells you something that you already know. He said he could hear Jill Scott, he could hear Lauryn Hill, he could hear Erykah badu…where is Wayna? And that stayed with me. It was ringing in my ear days after the meeting was over. And the scary thing is that I didn’t really have a clear answer. The more I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t even come close to figuring it out with my music.

Did you feel pressure after your Grammy nomination when entering the studio to work on your new album [Wayna was nominated for Best Urban/Alternative Performance for the song “Lovin You (Music)” at the 2009 Grammy Awards]?

It made me raise the bar for what I was doing and promise myself that no matter what I was doing, I was going to do it better. It also gave me more opportunities. It gave me access to producers that I didn’t have access to before. There were people who were willing to do things for me because of the potential of the work being heard by more ears. I had more resources and I also felt a real responsibility to go to another level.

“The Expats” pulls from sounds all over the world. You have also proudly declared, “I am a world artist” as if you weren’t too sure about it before. How have you transitioned into owning and becoming a “world” artist?

When you do hold a piece of yourself back, whether consciously or not, when you finally stop doing that it feels liberating and you want to emphasize it for the world. I had a moment like that when I was sending the content to the disk manufacturer and they asked for the genre of the album and I proudly put down the “world” genre and submitted it. The reason I am embracing this with pride is that there is a huge element of risk in terms of commerciality that I am taking there by doing that. Most record execs will look at a song that cannot get on the radio as a waste of money…I  don’t believe that it couldn’t have the universal appeal, but most commercial-minded people think that if it doesn’t have a certain type of hook or beat, they’d be like what is this. I feel a certain amount of pride in making that creative choice and feeling confident in finding other avenues for getting the music heard like singing live or doing festivals or going overseas and finding a whole new market. Especially with urban music, black artists are not given many paths to expressing themselves and being successful.

At your listening party you described the album as “Radiohead meets Fela.” There are much more African influences in this album like using Haile Selassie’s [1936] “League of Nation” speech in the song “Time Will Come”. I know you left Ethiopia when you were three, so how have these African influences made their way into the album?

I didn’t even completely understand the ways in which [African] styles and rhythms and sounds are apart of who I am. I wasn’t even conscious of that. The first realization happened when i went to this traditional music festival in Ethiopia called “The Festival of One Thousand Lights.” It’s amazing and they have all these traditional musicians particular to the region. Even the way they dance and their clothes are particular to their lives. When I saw them perform, they were completely untouched by the western world. Everything was indigenous, and I completely understood the music…the rhythms, the counter-rhythms, the melodies were just so…so familiar. I was just so completely at home. I hadn’t realized how much it was like me. Once I started experimenting by embedding African music in the music I realized that I had all of these natural instincts that I didn’t have with other kinds of music. It just fit.

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>via: http://afripopmag.com/2013/12/ethiopian-american-singer-wayna-looks-within-on-new-album-the-expats/