Heavy Is the Crown

Best-known as one-quarter of Kenyan supergroup Sauti Sol, singer-songwriter Chimano embarks on an introspective yet celebratory solo journey with 2022’s Heavy Is the Crown. The title—a play on the axiom “heavy is the head that wears the crown”—emphasizes a coronation as Chimano surges past the burden of the huge societal expectations that come with being a celebrity, and choices in love, faith, and everything else.

“Everybody goes through life wanting to be something, and they’re usually under very huge expectations from society,” Chimano tells Apple Music. “You get judged a lot. But people just power through and they dream of themselves instead and work towards it. So, if you’re good at what you do, if you stand in what you believe in, it’s you wearing a crown. No one else is putting a crown on you. It’s you. You have to seek your own validation.”

Created during Sauti Sol’s “Alone Together” life/musical chapter (in which group members Bien, Savara, Polycarp, and Chimano take a break to express themselves as individual artists), the pandemic-inspired project skirts back to the past and also ruminates on themes of nostalgia and vulnerability as Chimano proclaims a new chapter of his life, a dedication to confining validation of himself to himself. And a vintage, late-’80s, early-’90s sound across all its seven songs layers the EP with all of the groovy experimentation of a genius unleashed. Here, Chimano (Willis Austin Chimano) breaks down the record, track by track.

“Friday Feeling”
“Usually, my friends and I don’t go out, but Friday is one time of the month when you go out and just dance. Tonight, we are going all out. We have our little coins to spend, but we are going to go to the dance floor, me and my friends. It’s that one time you let loose your boundaries and you just flow, and it all works out, which is rare, which is why I call it the ‘feeling.’ It’s usually rare, but when it happens, it truly happens.”

“Freedom”
“‘Freedom’ is a bit of a flexible song in double meaning. But for me, what it means is there was a time, I think, there was a lot of social media bullying, and I was just going through a lot of shit, and it was quite an event. It really took a toll on me. So, basically, freedom for me is being free [from] all of that negative energy and not taking myself down with that negative energy. But it’s also freedom of the mind.”

“Loser”
“In my art, I either want you to really love it or to hate it. I want there to be an emotion all the time. I want you to feel something. So, that is at least what I’ll tell you to expect. But then vulnerability will always be there. That was this song for me.”

“Hallelujah”
“This song was a Sauti Sol song and was written by Bien, my bandmate. So, he wrote it a while back for a previous manager’s wedding—it was put out for the bride to walk down the aisle. Then we tried to record this song many, many times, but for some reason, either we were not totally into it, or it just wasn’t really working, or something like that. We let it go for the last three years or so, but I always thought about the song. I told Bien, ‘When I’m going to do my EP, this song, you’re giving it to me.’ Every time I listened to it, I kept on shedding a tear or 10. As I was recording it, it was a bit of a higher register. So, my producer and I were just like, let’s take it down a few notes here. Let’s give it a Johnny Cash feeling and then make it ’80s but also still make it 2022.”

“Beautiful Day”
“I wrote it for my partner. Our Sundays are usually very wonderfully boring. Sleeping, doing nothing, zero guilt. Sometimes our Mondays too. Lazing around, eating leftover food, and other extracurricular activity. I sat on the couch one time, and I was going to get something in the bedroom. I just started humming, ‘It’s a beautiful day.’ So, I just put it in my phone. A year later, I was with my songwriter, and we mixed it together, sung it together, and this is what came about.”

“Stereo”
“My folks used to have this boom box in the house, a radio that looked like a boom box. So, I used to take my mom’s choir cassettes and put them in there. We used to press record and play at the same time, and then I’m able to record what was playing on the radio. What I didn’t know was that I was deleting the content of my mom’s cassettes. So, ‘Stereo’ was just a remembrance of that period, where I was doing that and thinking about how my voice was going to be heard on radio, and especially listening to it through the boom box. For me, it was just a moment of nostalgia. But it’s also, with the beat, if you listen to it, it’s very early pop, ’90s African music, all of that. That’s what I was going for because that’s within that time period.”

“Mad Love”
“I was directly addressing my fans who have been with me throughout the years. I just have mad love for my friends and also for people who are my fans, because at some point, when I was concentrating so much on negativity and all of that, people were just telling me, ‘There’s people who love you so, so much. Why are you giving so much energy when people are saying negative things to you?’ Remember your people who love you and people who will fight for you.”