Born in New York City to Haitian emigrants and activists, Leyla McCalla possesses a stunning mastery of the cello, tenor banjo and guitar and, as a multilingual singer and songwriter, has risen to produce a distinctive sound that reflects the union of her roots and experience. Today she is announcing the new album ’Sun Without the Heat,’ a record that is playful and full of joy while holding the pain and tension of transformation.
Coming out April 12, she is also sharing two tracks from the album today that show its range, in terms of sound and storytelling.
‘Scaled to Survive’ is about being born and the connection we have to our parents, particularly our mothers. Leyla was inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ powerful book Undrowned where Gumbs looks to the transformative lessons of marine mammals as recipes for survival – ones that reach across species. “Thank you for laughing me into your portal,” McCalla quotes Gumbs as she sings to parents and to those who parent us beyond blood. Watch the song’s new video, featuring McCalla’s own children and their friends, below.
Watch ‘Scaled to Survive’: https://youtu.be/Lho7YH4jLCw
In the second new single, ‘Tree’, McCalla shares a fictionalized fable about a woman overlooking the Mediterranean Sea who turns herself into a tree because she doubts that she can ever be loved. The musical conversation between Shawn Myers’s drums and Nahum Zdybel’s psychedelic fuzz guitar comes to the forefront, heating up to a sped up tropicalisma–inspired samba. ‘Tree’ reminds us that the you and the me of this album are never singular, but are always shaped and healed by a collective, the spirit of the cypher.
Listen to ‘Tree’: https://youtu.be/wXeLGmKMKD0
In addition to Gumbs, McCalla draws lyrical inspiration from the writings of Black feminist Afrofuturist thinkers Octavia Butler and adrienne maree brown. Like these authors, McCalla looks to songwriting to increase faith and hope, encourage community thinking, and catalyze personal transformation. “Songwriting is a modality to tell the stories that need to be told,” she explains. “Sometimes these are painful stories to tell.”
The album’s title is also a literary reference which pulls from Frederick Douglass’s 1857 speech to a largely white crowd of abolitionists six years before the Emancipation Proclamation. His words echo in the song: “You want the crops without the plow / You want the rain without the thunder / You want the ocean without the roar of its waters.” Douglass’s point — which McCalla weaves into the song’s central message —is that liberation and equity are not possible without committing to transformative action.
“We all want the warmth of the sun but not everybody wants to feel the heat,” McCalla explains. “You have to have both.”
Pre-order – ‘Sun Without the Heat’
1. Open the Road
2. Scaled to Survive
3. Take Me Away
4. So I’ll Go
5. Tree
6. Sun Without the Heat
7. Tower
8. Love We Had
9. Give Yourself a Break
10. I Want to Believe
