“There were obviously things I admired about these artists,” he says, “but I realized there were also things they admired about me.” Pharrell was drawn to Caesar’s palette of influences-a mix of gospel, R&B, rock, and soul-while Caesar hoped he’d absorb some of Pharrell’s signature playfulness. “People who I never thought I’d ever collaborate with, until the opportunity came up and it was like, ‘Is this really real?’”Įven more surprising, perhaps, was the degree to which the studio sessions felt like true artistic exchanges. “But I also needed to free myself from that-to live.” Once he’d regained some creative confidence, he drafted a fantasy lineup of artists to work with on the new music-Pharrell, Brandy, John Mayer. And I was raised religious, so it’s like my operating system,” he says.
“I’d been reading a lot about Judaism and Kabbalah and meditation.
“They’re my favorite.” He found he kept circling back to themes of death and spirituality. “To not be so scared of failure.”ĬASE STUDY 01, his existential follow-up, is denser, headier, and riskier, confronting ideas like good and evil, life and death, loneliness, and God. “Everything dies, everything changes-I had to embrace that,” he says. “For a while, I didn’t want to leave my house.” The thing that ultimately freed him from his creative rut was finding comfort in his own mortality. “I got pretty depressed,” he tells Apple Music, citing artistic pressure, social media, and the isolation of fame as factors.
After Daniel Caesar released his soul-baring debut album, Freudian, tracing his decision to leave home and the church at 17, he became one of R&B’s most promising poets, able to distill spiritual complexities into deceptively simple love songs.
0 kommentar(er)
