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Rb Hip Hop
Masego Finds New Ground With ‘Fix Your Face’ Album and Tour
"I didn't know that Montreal was gonna be one of my loudest shows, and Toronto was gonna be one of my most diverse shows. I never know what to expect with what each album will attract, and it was a pleasant surprise," he tells Billboard Canada. "The first chapter of my career was very melodic instrument-wise, but [on] this album I'm singing a lot, and people's reaction to me singing is hilarious: 'Oh, he riffs? He sings high notes?!'"
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That evolution has required as much unlearning as learning. Masego has been breaking the habit of instinctively picking up his saxophone onstage or adding saxophone solos to his recordings. By resisting an instrument that has become so closely associated with him, he has made more room for his voice — and discovered a different kind of connection with his audience in the process.
"[I've] gotta talk about Montreal because that was where you could most tell there were other artists, people that make music and art," he explains. "I could feel the appreciation for the little Easter eggs, inside jokes and musical nerdy things, and the reception from it, but then it was mad loud. We had to stop a song for like a minute just so they could cheer. It was just crazy."
That greater reliance on his voice is also tied to the vulnerability at the heart of Fix Your Face. Getting there, however, required some study. The singer used his own musical inspirations as both reference points and models for how to "cry, let people know you did it and own it," delving into album liner notes and studying performances by R&B icons like Lauryn Hill, D'Angelo and Canada's own PartyNextDoor to understand how they tackle such personal topics and translate that vulnerability to the stage.
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"[PartyNextDoor's] pen is incredible, and the Caribbean blood helps as well," he says. "I love the way he starts his songs in the middle, like you just jumped into a movie and it's halfway through, and you kind of climb your way out of it. I've taken so much inspiration from him because he's able to speak his own story and then speak from the perspective of someone else, a woman. It's incredible. I love his work with SZA, his work with Summer Walker, with Rihanna."
MasegoCam Hicks
That instinct to study, experiment and then make something his own extends beyond his approach to songwriting. Masego continues to push at the edges of his sound, combining genres like funk, jazz and soul with Caribbean styles like dancehall. For him, each new sound presents another creative problem to solve, whether it's experimenting with Haitian Konpa and spontaneously incorporating it into his live set, or studying the riffs, runs and breakdowns that shape R&B music.
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Experimentation inevitably comes with the possibility that something won't work. For Masego, that's precisely the point. He acknowledges the fear of doing something different, but also believes those creative risks allow artists to truly bear the fruits of their labour. In his case, that has meant everything from the "dream come true" of hearing fans sing his lyrics back to him to watching audiences embrace the scale of a 20-piece band on tour.
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"The risk and the thing that makes somebody an artist — I believe, at least in the people I admire — is to do something that you don't know if it'll work or not, and you do it in front of the world," he says. "If you fail or you succeed, you do it in front of people."
Fix Your Face
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