Baaba’s new single Agreement is available to stream everywhere now.
“Agreement is about the relationships you make in your life, whether they are with friends, musicians, neighbours, people you love. When you say to people, we are going on this journey through life together, through good times and bad, you should be very sure that you mean it. It’s based on a proverb from my community – to say no at the beginning to the idea that we will always be together is much stronger and more noble that beginning a relationship and then cutting it short later, maybe forty years later. Be mature enough to take seriously an agreement you make with someone about the future, about your souls being connected.”
The hypnotic track features Barou Sall, a Hoddu master and long time Baaba Maal collaborator. The Hoddu is a traditional Senegalese instrument which prefigures the banjo, and accompanies Baaba’s pure, searching vocal, backed by Mamadou Sarr’s delicate percussion.
Listen
Listen to the new single, ‘Agreement’
Save
Save the new single ‘Agreement’ to your playlist and get access to an exclusive first listen of ‘Casamance Nights’, track number 7 from the forthcoming album, ‘Being’. Once saved to your playlist the link below will redirect you to the preview.
Save the new single, ‘Agreement’
Watch
Baaba Maal’s daring and dazzling new album, ‘Being’, will be released on March 31st, 2023.
The record is a powerful continuation of his pioneering, transcendent work over the last forty years, blending the ancient and the modern, the acoustic and the electronic. Extending his productive partnership with producer and multi-instrumentalist Johan Karlberg (Self Esteem, The Very Best, Santigold), his first album since 2016’s The Traveller, Being was recorded in Brooklyn, London and Senegal. On ‘Being’, there are seven songs shimmering in exquisitely clashing equilibrium between dirty thorny desert blues and intangible electro-spirituals, between uplifting chants and trance-like freak outs. They are about generational debts and conflicts, rivers, watching people, seeing new generations of Africans make themselves felt, the impact of technology, remembering dreams, the magic of place, the strangeness of time, the feeling of home, the stars above, and the rhythms inside and out.
Tracklist:
- Yerimayo Celebration
- Freak Out Ft. The Very Best
- Ndungu Ruumi
- Agreement
- Boboyillo Ft. Rougi
- Mbeda Wella Ft. Paco Lenol
- Casamance Nights
“Each song of this album has its own personality. A song is like a person. It has a life, name, a character, and it has a position in life. I think that’s what makes this album so powerful – it is totally about now and where I am now, the dreams I have of the past and the future.”
Baaba Maal