“He’s the future man, he’s the future”, said Quincy Jones, the famed producer behind Michael Jackson’s biggest albums, about a young Leven Kali. While Leven isn’t one of the most known artists, your favorite artist probably knows him. His co-writing credits stretch pretty far from Playboi Carti to Beyonce, and he even featured on Disclosure’s newest single. But Leven’s sound is better defined by classic funk artists like Parliament and Sly and the Family Stone rather than to his contemporaries. If you need a place to start with Leven’s music, listen to “Are U Still”, a smooth, funky RnB song, and finish the rest of the EP after that. On October 1st of this year I got to be apart of a conference with Leven Kali: My question for Leven was pretty simple: where does he like to start when writing his songs? A pretty generic question, but hearing the density and the fluidity of his songs, it’s a pretty hard question to answer on your own. His answer: melody or bass. As he explains that he likes to start with melodies because they act as a “north star” for which everything else follows.
Though he noted recently that he likes starting with bass because it isn’t restricted by chords and can flow without constraints. His love for this kind of fluidity was later explained when he revealed one of his biggest inspirations: water. Particularly, he brought up water’s ongoing relationship with life and even citing Dr. Emoto’s study on water claims that water’s molecular structure is affected by human thoughts, emotions, and sounds. And if this seems a little out there, then that’s a good thing. Leven gave some advice for creatives to, “Don’t follow any trend of what you think is going to make you successful. Because anything that you like, there is a community for that.” Which seems to be working for Leven Kali as he continues to be a shining light in the RnB and funk space. But if Leven Kali and his music had to be boiled down to one thing, it would be the very thing that he wants his music to do for others: “I would love for someone to listen to my music, and then get inspired to do whatever they want to do creatively, in whatever new way they may have been afraid to do because maybe it hasn’t been done before.” Leven Kali’s EP LK:99 The Prelude out now.
- Bentley Bradford
