Episode: Michael Kiwanuka on Song Exploder

Listen: Song Exploder

Song Exploder is always excellent, but this episode with Michael Kiwanuka, of White Little Lies theme-music fame, is spectacular.

The British singer was making music long before his song “Cold Little Heart,” made it to the HBO show White Little Lies. In this episode he breaks down a song from the same album, “I’m a Black Man in a White World,” which was released in the summer of 2016.

I listened to the album, Love & Hate, through last summer, and I always felt like an intruder when that song played; like I should ask permission from every black man before I listened in on a song that was so obviously theirs.

In the episode Kiwanuka says he tried to change the lyrics to soften the starkness of it — he didn’t want people to be offended — but stuck with it because “it felt so true to me.”