09 November 2013
Newsdesk
M.I.A. admits she feared people would consider her new album “weird”.
The 38-year-old musician released her fourth studio effort Matangi this month, which is named after the Hindu goddess of music.
M.I.A. explored reincarnation and other religious concepts on this record and she confesses it was challenging to communicate spirituality in her songs.
"[Reincarnation] is 5,000 years old and it's a bit weird for people," she told MTV News.
"At first I didn't know how the concept of Matangi even works in India, in the place where [it originated], so to bring it to the West and be like, 'There's this concept that's a bit weird' was difficult.
“But if you believe in reincarnation, then there's one way of doing it, which Snoop [Lion] did — you can reincarnate your character, or there's reincarnation based on life, so I was playing with both of those things, based on the ability to change."
M.I.A. says she entered new musical territory on her new album.
The star incorporated almost every genre she is inspired by into these tracks.
"I was exploring and as the album grew I realised it was a landscape of sound," M.I.A. explained.
"It wasn't like Kala or any of my other albums where it was really a specific sound. It was an ode to everything that was good about music that I love, so it's a retrospective of music — not particularly mine, but everyone's--and the Weeknd was played a lot during the years I wrote this album so I guess it seeped in."
