DEVA MAHAL: Using Art As A Weapon
An interview by Tim Gruar.
Hawaii-born/Poneke based Soul music powerhouse Deva Mahal will be headlining Friday Night at the upcoming WOMAD Festival in New Plymouth performing material from her brand-spanking new e.p. FUTURE CLASSIC: VOL 1 – CLASSIC EP, which will drop on the same evening, 17 March. Her publicity refers to it as a work of “…beauty and many colours of a black woman’s soul”. This new release will explore themes of “duality, sexuality, racism, sorrow, love, strength, growth and perseverance”. The sound is big, awesome even. But it would surprise you to know that most of the e.p. was made in confined spaces, not a sprawling studio.
I recently had a chat with Deva about making music in her bedroom and the global events that inspired the huge messages in these new songs.
So, how do you describe Deva Mahal? Well, try to imagine Brittany Howard, Aretha Franklin and Michael Kiwanuka were all blended into one person, and you’ll be halfway there. Daughter of US blues musician Taj Mahal, sister of Zoe Moon, she’s a veteran performer who’s trodden stages from the Hollywood Bowl to Carnegie Hall to SXSW to the Byron Bay Blues Festival. And the rest.
As a song writer she’s notched up nominations for the 2021 Apra Silver Scroll and the 2019 A2IM Indie Awards and contributed two compositions and vocals on the Grammy award winning album “The Wild Card” by Ledisi, as well performing original work for the 2021 Biden/Harris inauguration and the 2021 rally for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
She’s worked with Son Little, Allen Stone, Jaleel Bunton of TV on the Radio, Binky Griptite of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Kris Bowers, Keb Mo and performed alongside Etta James, Björk, Ceelo Green, Angelique Kidjo, Michael Stipe, Patti Smith, and The Roots as well as local legends such as Tami Neilson, Troy Kingi, Fat Freddy’s Drop and Trinity Roots. And that’s just those I can fit on the page!
Her star was rising even higher, back in New York City in 2018, when she released her debut album, ‘Run Deep’, followed by a series of singles and consequential tours. Then, things took a dark turn, grounding her back in her hometown, Poneke/Wellington. It all started when Deva came back for a visit in 2020 and was forced to stay due to urgent surgery. She needed an emergency myectomy – a surgical procedure performed to reduce heart muscle thickening in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). She says that symptoms were becoming debilitating, affecting one of side of her body, down to her leg and restricting her walking. There were no other options.
Following the surgery, she was advised to stay put, with no flying. Right about that time, the country was plunged into the first Lockdown and Deva was permanently grounded in Poneke for the foreseeable future.
Often, it’s out of adversity that the best creativity comes. Deva hunkered down and wrote most of the material for her new e.p. FUTURE CLASSIC: Vol 1 – CLASSIC with Christchurch based and born producer Chris Wethey and collaborator Michael Howell. “I met Chris when he came to one of my shows and introduced himself. Later he came up and hung out with me, stayed on an airbed at my place in Wellington. I did all the cooking. We made most of the e.p. in my bedroom, with extras like some of the recording of ‘Travel With Me’, and various tracking done at Surgery Studios. We’d do everything – arranging the music, recording, engineering, mixing. I love working with Lee (Prebble)… Yeah, The Surgery is my favourite studio. It’s home when I’m here. So many albums and recordings I’ve worked on there.”
There are some powerful tracks on the e.p. Songs cover a range of topics. Aching love (‘I want you (for All time); communication (‘On Read’); self-esteem (‘Worthy’).
‘Run Me Through’ is a soul connector. “It’s like you have your own muse, on your shoulder. There are times when you need to make a decision, emotionality, and the muse is on your shoulder guiding you. You can be mislead by people’s behaviour, and you need to be weary of them, before giving away your heart. Sometimes you get hoodwinked. You think you are in love with this person, and they are totally awful. You needed that advise before you got there, you know? All your friends were, like, “Girl, don’t do it!” but you do, despite all! We’ve all been there“, she says, laughing. So that is why we need that muse.
But one topic stands out even more than the others. The opener “Will Anything Change” is a big, ballsy, soul and blues track that speaks to all the events, emotions and feelings of the last two years.
Deva tells me it was informed by Covid and recent political events in the USA and here, too. It incorporates own her experiences – like her attendance at the first Women’s March 2020 on January 18 2020, held in Washington. That march was based on three specific themes: immigration, climate change and reproductive rights. “Women’s uteruses were under attack. And this was before the Court overturned Roe vs Wade.”
The DC march was attended by 10,000, and later inspired another on October 17, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Trump nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett replacing her with a looming and significant ideological shift in the winds. “It was this feeling of total crazy – we were across party lines, yes! We’re here to support women’s rights. It was a positive message. But now it felt like we were continually going backward”. As we now know that had an impact on the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the setting back of women’s rights.
Deva also says the song is about this feeling of helplessness that you get when you see people like yourself being oppressed and impacted but can’t do anything directly.
“As a Black woman I saw black women, particularly in the USA being affected by all sorts of things. The way police and objectors were hurting people at Black Lives Matter Protests, and the way laws were being overturned. The gradual receding of funding over the years for education, particularly in history, so that people couldn’t even learn about their history and particularly Black histories.“
“There’s this feeling of being under attack, but no course of action to bring yourself to safety. Psychologically under attack and your body responds as if you are physically under attack, even though all these events are happening so far away. Watching young children and people being killed that look like you, so much in danger all the time. It was traumatizing. And then I would hear more. I was in a safe place (being back in Poneke/Wellington) but psychologically I wasn’t. You know? And I thought – ‘How do I respond, engage in this conversation, stand up for my community, use this platform, my music? I had to write about it in some way. Your art is your greatest weapon sometimes.”
She talks about the assault on the capital on Jan 6th, the fallout of the supreme court nominations and many other recent events. “To be watching that and everything in real time, the depreciation of American democracy is so surreal. You have to do something about it. What can I do?”
“There’s also this intense appropriation of Black culture and still a rejection of the people. That is a challenge many in my community face every day. Living and embracing your culture even when others are rejecting it, denying it. Seen as not as exciting or worthy of recognition unless you are performing, on screen, on stage – a celebrity or sports icon or hip-hop star. Ten people are, like, respectful. But even then ‘you’ can get on an airplane, like rapper Taleb Kweli did, and get kicked off the plane because the say they are afraid of you, they don’t recognise you. If they knew who he was, they (the airline staff) would have afforded him a different kind of approach. But, my point, they have to know who you are. Your humanity isn’t enough. Even in Aotearoa you are seeing people embrace American Black culture and not embrace ‘you’, me,” she says speaking from personal experience, “and that needs to be called out. Appropriating without honouring its origins. And that’s all part of the song, ‘Will Anything Change’, too.”
She mentions our journey here, in Aotearoa, as we look to embrace Māoritanga, tikanga and te reo and warns that we need to do this with an open mind.
“Some people will look and say they have no roots in this culture and just, you know, do a haka or sing a waiata but not really invest in it. Say it’s too hard or they might get it wrong so don’t even try. You know, sometimes you have to look into a culture, its history, when it doesn’t sit well with you. Feelings of shame, guilt or denial will come out. That’s a hard thing to deal with in any relationship. But you can’t deny a people because of that. They are there, in front of you.”
So, I ask, is that part of the reason, in her view, that Conservative America is pushing back, against things like BLM? Because they feel guilty and can’t deal with that?
“That’s part of it. But America is so vast. Everybody’s lived experience can be so wildly different. You can live your whole life in some places never having any opposing view and then, on the television, they are telling you this. And you are like “I’ve never experienced this. Nobody around me has experienced this. What are they now telling me? Is this true?” And Conservative media, in particular, preys on that, creates this sense of outrage and moral panic. They manipulate people. Funding in education has been systematically reduced over years, decade. No wonder they protest when a Confederate statue is taken down. Because they don’t know the real history behind it, or what that person (depicted) was really like.”
“People lose their knowledge and points of reference. People are under fed, underpaid, undereducated and the country is founded on some of the most heinous, most racist violent ideology. I feel like in the 80’s and 90’s people were getting ‘fat’ off reality TV, commercialism like Subway, Safeway, MTV and all those other franchises. Everyone’s having a good time and then they’ve forgotten the racist underbelly of our country. And there was this idea that it was gone, because the 60’s dealt with it. That somehow bore out this culture of dehumanising, which started in the days of slaves but then moved to commercialism, reducing you to a number or a client. Then out of that we’ve seemed to change to this kind of tribalism where people look at each other and say “You don’t look like one of us. Think like us”. Then, because of that, this culture of weird ideology takes over, which is stronger than facts, distorts the facts, you know. People don’t want to acknowledge their history or even that they are just humans. We saw it in America. But now that’s here too. And as an artist, I have to respond to that somehow, too.”
Deva says that this distortion of history and facts leads to a further distortion of morality to the extent it becomes some kind of battleplan.
“There’s this smoke screen that goes up, you know? For instance, why are they defending against gun control and being morally outraged about drag queens reading to kids in elementary schools. It’s a smokescreen. Diverting attention away from the real issues with trivia. A conversation about drag queens, saying you need to protect your children, but you are part of the gun lobby and keep your firearms within reach of your kids! But that really hurt people. It hurts the transgender community, and it allows guns to still be there, and they hurt people. It’s just layering up crazy shit so they can get everybody at odds with each other so they can carry on behind the scenes, as they were. People are out there voting and protesting about things that are not in their own personal interest but just can’t see it. So, again, all of that is in the feelings that made me write this and other songs.”
While the topics she covers are heavy, Deva’s voice remains light and upbeat. You can hear her genuine optimism and manaaki. Her music, she reminds me, is about connection, even when the subjects are confronting.
Soul music, she says has always been about strength at a time of adversity. Heroes like Mavis Staples, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin all sung with that conviction about love, relationships and most of all inequality. She takes strength from their example and as you can see from her comments above is definitely on the same page as they are. Soul music was there when we need it most she says.
“Soul music is always helpful. Music that moves your soul, R’N’B can have so much effect, as does Folk music. It’s the approach. It’s how it stirs everything up for you – moves your body, your mind, your blood. It connects to your soul! Takes you to that place!”
Deva is looking forward to the WOMAD stage, bringing her sound and her full band. She’ll also be cooking the following day.
“Yeah. I love cooking. I’ll be making a sweet potato souffle. That should be great. I might sing a bit while I’m cooking. You should come and check it out, it’s real good. It’s sooth your soul“, she laughs “I’ll try to save you a slice!” With an offer like that, who can refuse?
Deva Mahal is performing live on the Dell Stage at 9pm on the 17th March. She will also be hosting a cooking demonstration (Sweet Potato Souffle) at the Taste The World Stage at 5pm on the 18th March – something not to be missed! WOMAD is being held in New Plymouth’s Bowl of Brooklands and surrounding parklands from the 17th – 19th March 2023. Tickets are still available from the WOMAD website, but get in quick as they’re selling fast!
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