Beckah Amani Just Wants You to Pick Up the Phone
The Tanzanian Australian folk-pop artist explores the peaks and pitfalls of love on “Call Home,” a highlight from her new album, ‘This Is How I Remember It.’
Beckah Amani’s latest single, “Call Home,” comes with the climactic crescendo of a rom-com original score, its sweeping gusto soundtracking the sumptuous, craggy ache in her voice. The Tanzanian Australian musician’s new full-length, This Is How I Remember It, is a concept album in part, tracking a conversation between two people who have just split up, focused on the fraught exchanges that go into navigating love. On this track, which comes toward the end of the story, Amani addresses the depression that can overtake a person early in a breakup, just as the realization that they may be OK begins to peek through the darkness. “Waiting for the part where everything gets better with time,” she sings, as if through elated tears. “I’m all right but I’m barely here/I should run but I’m standing still.”
A gentle guitar melody and a smattering of handclaps from British producer T’van are just the light touch “Call Home” needs to showcase Amani’s subtly powerhouse vocals, the arrangement bringing out the song’s sense of running through a rainy field to nowhere in particular, buoyed only by the twin adrenaline rush of power and vulnerability.
This Is How I Remember It draws from alt-pop, folk, and the music Amani heard growing up in Tanzania with her Burundian parents, ranging across subtle Afrobeats, classic Philly-style soul, jangly pop, concert-hall ballads, and stripped-down weepers. A few songs are co-produced by the British electronic producer Jakwob, who you may recognize from his work with Nia Archives, Little Simz, Shygirl or—if you are of a certain dubstep music-blog age—his breakthrough 2009 Ellie Goulding remix. One of these is “Sober,” on which Amani focuses her love and seraphic harmonies on the various besieged peoples around the world over a dubby drum kit and horn section. Her voice is clear-headed and emotionally resolute when she delivers the chorus:
Let’s talk about my brothers back home
Talk about their fears and the bombs
Let's talk about borders and death in waters
’Cause nothing ever changes
Amani’s versatility is admirable—catch me bopping in the chair when she sings about a toxic bad-boy on the amapiano-influenced standout “Superstar”—but the magic here really comes from her vocal agility, and the truth within it. Is she method-singing? Perhaps—Amani fully inhabits the songs, putting it all on the table until you find yourself living for a moment in the painful, messy, beautiful world she’s creating, too.
