A summer single for everyone
Don’t miss the new single from Ethiopian jazz singer Meklit, “I Want to Sing for Them All.”
Take the one-of-kind vocal stylings of Ethio-American jazz musician Meklit, add the genius production talents of Dan Wilson (the Grammy-winning producer behind Adele’s “Someone Like You”) and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird — and you’ve got yourself a serious contender for 2017’s Song of the Summer. Listen to Meklit’s new single “I Want to Sing for Them All” now.
The song is the first taste of Meklit’s upcoming third album, When The People Move, The Music Moves Too, produced by Dan Wilson, who’s worked with everyone from Adele and the Dixie Chicks to John Legend and Taylor Swift. Meklit first met Wilson at the TED2013 Conference in Long Beach, California, when he stopped into her soundcheck for a late-night performance. “We just hit it off afterwards,” Meklit says. “And we talked about music and ideas for a week.”
They stayed in touch after the conference, and three years later they began working together on a record. During that process, Dan suggested that Meklit write an anthem that defined her as a musician. “We talked a lot about the fact that I’ve been doing this Ethiopian-American, singer-songwriter, global Jazz thing for a long time, and it’s a lot that lives together in one sound,” Meklit says. “And Dan said, ‘I think it’d be really cool if you wrote an anthem. Now, just think about what that means, and do what you want with it.’”
Eventually, Meklit realized what exactly that “anthem” would sound like. “One day, I just knew exactly what I had to do — which was to tell people who my influences were and how they come together inside of music,” she says.
The result, “I Want to Sing for Them All,” is an ode to all of her sundry musical ancestors — from Michael Jackson and Leonard Cohen to Aster Aweke and Mahmoud Ahmed. “They all have a place at my table with me,” she sings on the new single. “Singing Ethio-Jazz in 2017. / I want to sing for them all.”
“The feel of the song, musically, is deeply, deeply, deeply Ethiopian,” Hadero says, noting that the tune is based on the triplet — a rhythmic structure common throughout African music. But it’s also structured like a traditional American pop song, with an alternating verse and chorus, and would fit comfortably on US Top 40 radio this summer. “And you can dance to it,” she adds.
Listen to the single now, and stay tuned for the new album When The People Move, The Music Moves Too, out on June 23.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
