WHAT'S MY FAVOURITE SONG?

I do not have any 'favourite' songs. I am in a polyamorous relationship with all my music. If I say that a particular song is my favourite, I have betrayed all the others. It is a grave sin.

My favourite song is the one I am currently listening to. I am always listening to something, Which is why I cannot own a pair of wireless earphones. Two hour charging time? What will I be doing in those 2 hours? I need music injected into me as it was produced, I do not trust this wireless approach. I need electrons to push each other along my high impedance cable,and I do not want that lag that comes with your fancy Bluetooth devices. It's there. You know it. Why would I want to listen to music late?

This is supposed to be a piece chronicling my favourite song, and this is me avoiding picking one. Gun to head to choose a song? I choose death. I can be one with all the music in the world. Promiscuous boy.

It came out in 2021. 138 BPM. Heavy drums. Serviceable chords. A broken girl with a message. Can she have a word real quick? She's tired of holding in some words, some feelings. The way she expresses herself is not how someone who said 'Can I have a word real quick' would say. All she wants is to love. Love is such an arduous task. All I want is to love. That's a lifetime of work.

What is unrequited love to you? Because that's what Iyanah Kiragu's '4U' feels like. A girl begging a person. To love. To be there for them. Through love, because it's the only way she knows how to.

This is my favourite song because I heard it and it weakened all the walls in me. I have been told repeatedly that I am brutal with my interactions. Which is true. No one deserves me. No one is to me what I am to them. Yes, I have warmth, but I am yet to meet anyone who is able to match it. So all the interactions seem to have been confirmations of my bias. And that is why there have been so many expulsions from my heart. No second chances.

Until I heard these words from Iyanah.

If I choose to interpret them not as words of desperation and despair, but words of the intensity that one person was capable of, only then can I hold on to hope that there exists someone who might be worth developing a soft spot for.

Well, that and the fact that the remix that I did for Iyanah was the second song that I put my hands on after quitting. In 2022, after 8 years of professionally pursuing my artistic musical dreams as a Music Producer, Label Head, A&R, and DJ as well as Sound Designer and Writer, I decided to abandon this godforsaken music industry and do something of value with my life. Something whose value is easily perceivable.

Welcome to Kenya, where we look down at our own artists until they make it locally. After that, we start comparing them to international acts. And once they become international acts, we criticise the artists that they choose to collaborate with.

Being an artist is thankless work. It tries to fill the voids we have. Wounds accrued in childhood. While most teenagers are learning how to sext and get oral sex in the school bathrooms, we are rehearsing. Learning an instrument. Being sexually assaulted by our musical instructors. Learning that the alcohol age limit should be lowered to 10. We have graduated from queuing for food to doing lines of coke for sustenance.

Any artist worth their salt has their vices, their destructive coping mechanisms. To go through all this in pursuit of mastering expression, and then have mediocre humans criticise your work and say that it is not good enough will sear the life out of you.

So I retired. Keep your music industry. I'll be a herdsman. I wanted to be the GOAT,now, I'll herd the goats instead. Life is poetic like that. Ironic.

After initially wanting to remix this song in 2022, I looked through my drive folder and found the vocals Dazzils had sent me more than a year before. I threw them into my DAW, FL Studio, pulled up a rhodes and wrote down those chords (I know you haven't heard them yet). A few days later, I sent my first render to Iyanah.

“This is a whole new song.” she said on 16th June 2023.

But the world did not deserve to hear it. Why should they?

So it has taken 2 years for me to finally release it.

What's my favourite song and why? Well, I hope I have answered your question.