The latest single from Bongeziwe Mabandla, ‘ukuthanda wena’ LISTEN, delivers a universal message of what it feels like to feel spurned in love, through an atmospheric song that’s hard to shake.
In what he describes as a song about “heartache and the dark side of love”, ‘ukuthanda wena’ takes its creative impulse from a time in Mabandla’s life when he felt his caring and devotion was being taken for granted.
“Sometimes you can have the purest and most beautiful intentions for someone but they can be met in the most horrible way,” says the multi-award winning artist. “Sometimes being a hopeless romantic and love-obsessed person can end up making you look like a fool.”
In creating the music for this searingly honest track, Mabandla and his collaborator, producer Tiago Correia-Paulo tapped into the darkness gestured at in the song’s lyrics as well as the time period in which the instrumentation first surfaced.
“The instrumental draft was composed around October 2020, when most of us were coming out of the darkest period of isolation, and were, quite frankly, still pretty unsure if it was actually safe to be out and about,” reveals Correia-Paulo.
The instruments on ‘ukuthanda wena’ were deliberately chosen to be indulgent and overwhelming and then unleashed with sufficient space to move from simple to complex, conveying a sense of urgency and bottled up energy. Says Correia-Paulo: “The emotional resonance of the production comes from the balancing act of layering instruments – like synths and various percussive elements – to achieve a build up, but never discarding its imminent release and return to simplicity.”
“The song is drum heavy because I wanted something that sounded aggressive to bring out the anger in the sound,” adds Mabandla. “I hope people will relate to ‘ukuthanda wena’ because it has a universal message of wanting love to be reciprocated and it comes from a really honest place. It also brings forth the understanding of one’s responsibility to themselves which is a very strong theme in the music on my new album.”
‘ukuthanda wena’ follows the recently-released ‘Noba Bangathini’, both taken from Mabandla’s forthcoming new studio album.
Bongeziwe Mabandla will tour through South Africa in late April & May.
