Sneak Peek: Kyle Abraham Podcast

Kyle Abraham: So “An Untitled Love” is a work that in 2018 I started just thinking about, and in the early part of the concept I was just thinking about, “Yeah, how can I make something that really kind of is celebrating ideas of really black love but also self-love in a way, and through the music of D’Angelo?” and the through line for me was thinking about my first year in college, going to Morgan State in Baltimore, Maryland, and D’Angelo’s first album, the Brown Sugar album, coming out at that time, and then thinking about my parents, who met at a historically black college in Wilberforce, Ohio, that college being Central State University, and trying to just kind of think about what their experience was like, think about the beautiful kind of lineage of love throughout our culture that I wanted to find a way to embrace and celebrate… I don’t know if it’s just where I’m at or what’s going on but I definitely want us to feel celebrated. I think it’s just as empowering or it’s just as much of an act of activism to find ways in which I can uplift us and celebrate us. It is still just as important for a lot of people to wake up to the injustices that we face or make works that show a body on the ground as a way of just addressing what’s happening all too often. But at the same time we also need to feel uplifted and we need to make sure that not only our youth but also our seniors can feel loved on and celebrated and find hope because that is so important for all of us, for all people, but especially those of us who have felt discouraged, disenfranchised for way too long.