Get To Know: Xenia Manasseh

New Wave Magazine got the chance to catch rising R&B artist Xenia Manasseh on the day she’s returned home to Nairobi, Kenya. Despite always on the go she has taken some time to talk to New Wave Magazine in the middle of her preparations for her music video shoot the next day.

As we chat we soon discover that music has been massive part of Xenia's life, her first piano lesson occurred when she was only two, joined Bandcamp at 10 but also learned the drums and guitar and bass. It was the benefit from being surrounded by a musical family, but she didn’t automatically set out for a professional music career, Xenia only started making intentional decisions towards music from the age of 18. Now in the beginning of her career, movement is something that is starting to become familiar to Xenia who has been travelling back from America to Nairobi since leaving for the prestigious Berkley music college as a teenager for vocal training, and also now for work in LA. The singer is warm and open as she enjoys the afterglow of her debut album LOVE/HATE Pt.1 , which was released earlier this month. The album is a deep expression of the ambiguity and different tones of love, as well as a proud expression of her Swahili culture. The project is easily to relate to due to the universal experience of love, and easily to take in due to Xenia’s soulful nature.

The self-proclaimed Manchester United fan hasn’t been home since April but finds comfort in familiar surroundings. “It’s so nice to comeback to a place where I know all the people who I’m going to interact with”, Xenia admits. “It’s refreshing.” Further speaking about her home she says, “Nairobi is a vibe. I always try to warn people that, listen, unless you are born here if you come here from outside, you’ll get trapped. There’s so much in a sense of comfort."

The album opens with recording of Xenia grandfather singing in Swahili. However, it wasn’t originally planned to feature on the project. “ He randomly sent me a voice note of him singing in May and I was like on my god, the timing of this couldn’t be any more perfect. It’s a proper representation of home and who I am because we grew up singing those songs. The song he sings I know it very well, she said, but "one thing I was afraid of was when I got home from the US was if my music was going to be accepted here.”

The song is “about this guy and his partner and what he’s saying is I love you and want to do all these things for you to make you secure. But I can’t be with you because of all these worldly pressures weighing on me.

“I thought it was a good love/hate balance”, Xenia said.

One thing that’s changed, however during the writing, recording and now release of Love/Hate Pt.1 is Xenia’s relationship with love. “When I started recording the album I was going through it! I was young and I thought that love was a necessity and felt that it had to come from outside of myself in order for me to feel whole.”

“I was definitely more on the hate side", she remarks after mentioning during the early days of writing that she had recently broken up with a partner. “More on the sad side but somehow in expressing those emotions I got to remember the beautiful things about it.” Xenia's soundscape in the album is very “heavily” R&B focused, but in the last few years she has experimented with a wide range of sounds but doesn’t hold much weight to the ideas of genre.

“It’s just music. It’s all just music, Xenia begins. “While I was in LA for these last few months I have worked on indie rock projects, afro-stuff and so many other different things now because I just like writing and challenging myself. But R&B will always be the core because of its honesty but now I’m fusing it to other genres.”

Honesty is something that Xenia's engages with utter transparency, as she gives details on her own self-inflicting wounds based on personal decisions. It’s an album that looks at both sides of the argument from the same perspective, signalling maturity and growth. You can’t move on from it without accepting the whole thing", she says with wisdom.

The singer moved to Atlanta, Georgia after she graduated from Berkley to work as a songwriter but battled with imposter syndrome at the start, after six months she wrote “60 to 70 songs” coming to the conclusion that she had “so much to say.” However, having to move back to home, she taught herself how to engineer and with the help of friends who found enough equipment to start recording in her bedroom. One of the standout tracks is ‘Last Night Check Up’ featuring American rapper Shalom Dubas. Speaking about the process Xenia says “I recorded my verse on my own in my bedroom and then I met Shalom two years later in Lagos." ‘Anticipate’ might be the official lead single but ‘Lowkey’ came out three years ago.

The album was scheduled to be released in 2020 but the release was delayed. But going with a gut feeling to release ‘Anticipate’ was later proven right on reflection because “I’m building anticipation”, revealed Xenia. Not being able to quite settle on only one thing that the singer wants people to take from the album she says “ being able to live in your truth and to be graceful with yourself.” Continuing, she says “ Love is all around. Everybody has encountered it, had it and lost it. I feel that we’ve grown up with all these ideas of things should be and how they should look like for love."

"There are similarities that we all experience and I guess that’s where stuff like music and art come in. It makes us all feel connected. But everyone still has their own individual journey and it’s okay to go through that and sit with all the parts that you play." She also acknowledges that since finishing the album that she has continued to live through more experiences, and other past experiences she hasn’t found the space to talk about yet. “It’s never all of it”, I have more stories you know? That haven’t even been summed up by this.

Love/Hate pt 1 is full of colour, shades, tones, feeling and weight. It’s the charting of Xenia's relationship with love and it’s redefinition. It’s also an incredible introduction to the singer as we wait for the rest of the parts to fall.

Listen here