A few weeks ago, I was tapped by Green Owl Records to remix the title track from the new album, and it was an absolute delight to work on. TVB’s music is so vibrant and melodic, and their hybrid production style lends itself quite naturally to remixing. In other words, they made the job quite easy for me. Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of catching up with Esau over the phone from his hotel room in Holland. — Alan Wilkis

Alan Wilkis: What do you write about? What are your songs about?

Esau Mwamwaya: I sing about love, nature, life, poets…. I sing tribal songs as well. But it depends because some of the songs that I sing are the ones that I composed sometime ago. But some of them may be inspired by the fact that when Radioclit gives me the beats… just the beat itself, the melody can inspire me to write a particular song [about] a particular subject.

AW: The beat makes you feel a certain way?

EM: Exactly. If something can inspire me in the beat, it might be the drum, maybe a guitar, a piano or something like that. A melody just gives me some inspiration to sing on a particular subject.

AW: That’s kind of how I write too. I make my beats first and then I sort of think about the lyrics last.

EM: It’s like I’m always thinking, what am I going to sing about? And then it just comes to me. [For] the song “Angonde”, I had the lyrics already. But when I heard that beat and melody, straight away I thought of that song, and I just translated it to the beat… to everything. That’s what I did.

AW: What can you tell me about the new album? How has your sound evolved since the mixtape?

EM: When we did the mixtape, I didn’t have so much expectations out of it. I [knew] that the mixtape was good, according to the response of everybody. Otherwise, I didn’t expect that much from the mixtape. At the end of the day, I know that it’s what made people aware of what The Very Best was doing. But I like the album more than the mixtape, because I think that the album defines [us] more than the mixtape. The album is more important to our sound.