Sunnier forecast: Langa Mavuso’s album Therapy was written in the wake of his partner’s death. Now, a year later, he releases Therapy: The Other Side, his progress report. Photos: Supplied
Langa Mavuso wanted to do this in person. He even asked. “I had actually asked the team if we could meet in person but they were like: ‘No one does that anymore.’ And I said: ‘That’s crazy.’”
Instead, we got two rectangles on a screen, one of which featured a bookcase I had to confess was digital.
“What is real in the world anymore?” he shot back, before graciously admiring my “lovely little home office”.
He’s nostalgic for a gentler era of press, when journalists took him out to restaurants and a feature meant a whole spread on the table. (I remember per diems. Try asking an editor for one now.)
“I think meeting in person also gets your guard down,” he says. Fitting, from a man who has spent a decade in music lowering his.
Today, 16 October, he releases Therapy: The Other Side, the deluxe edition of last year’s album Therapy. If the original was a record you needed a cry and a lie-down for, the sequel is where somebody finally opens the curtains. Therapy was written in the wake of his partner’s death and he doesn’t dress that up.
“I wrote Therapy just after my partner had passed and I was really seeking to find joy, love and happiness again. I was going through the process of therapy. So there’s a real sense of an existential crisis in the beginning of the project.”
Yearning in the middle. A breakdown near the end. Then a lean towards his mother on Mama, made with Ndabozulu, and finally Hallelujah, a song he describes as pure manifestation: “No more tears, no more pain, no more stress, no more strain. We’re going to live in abundance.”
A year on, the universe appears to have taken notes. Therapy earned him a Sama for Best Produced Album, his first, and the deluxe edition is the progress report. “The Other Side is kind of like an update on that manifestation. Now that we’ve arrived at it, what does it look like? What does it feel like?”
The answer is four new songs, written between last year and June and a considerably sunnier forecast.
Let It Be began in the bath.
“I was thinking about everything that I want in this world,” he says, eating a bag of chips and singing into his phone. He sent the voice note to his producer in New York. It came back and he cried. When his manager asked what on earth she was listening to, his answer was simple: “That’s literally me in the bath.”
A gospel collaboration was finished alongside the original album but beginning I was very reserved and everyone thought I was calm. Now I think they’re starting to see, oh, a little bit of a firecracker sometimes.”
Anyone who has caught him live knows the firecracker lives in the wardrobe. I tell him the outfits are always one of the highlights of his shows. He styles himself, he says, with help from designer friends he made at art school and from stylist Noa Serati, who he throws ideas at and who then tracks down designers. “We definitely do the dance between the masculine and the feminine a lot. I’m a very soft man. But I’m still hard in moments.”
Flowers made an appearance at the Therapy launch, too. “I’m a boy from Diepkloof, but bougie as hell.”
For the Samas he borrowed two suits that were essentially the same design — one blue, one black — like a photograph and its negative: two sides of the same person. It was also a tribute to his grandmother. He’s Zulu through his biological father but was raised by his Xhosa grandmother.
Red has been the colour of this whole era. “I wanted to embody passion, I wanted to embody love, but I also wanted to capture the bleeding of pain.” Hence the pieces that hang and trail off him on stage.
The theatricality traces back to the National School of the Arts, where he was “in all the plays, all the musicals”, and to a habit of going to the theatre at least once a month. Gregory Maqoma’s Cion and Genesis showed him how movement changes the way you feel music. And at a music show, “nine times out of 10”, he’s in the audience watching his friends, taking notes.
That open-door attitude is why the Sama win means so much. He used to write and produce alone. For this project he invited anyone and everyone into the writing camp, including producers aged 19 and 20. “There is no true solo album unless you’re a Prince who can play nine instruments.” He then made sure every producer got a statuette of their own. “Open up the room and send the lift back down. You don’t want to be at the top alone.” held back. “It was still fresh in the minds of the public; the grief that I had gone through.”
Where Therapy had him questioning God (“Do I beg you again?”), this one shows where his spirituality sits now. Mina Nawe started in the car. Mavuso and Khanyi Mkhize, his long-time collaborator, have a habit of singing along to popular songs while driving. They posted one. It went viral on TikTok. “Everyone was like: oh my God, who’s this girl? Sing some more.’” And then there’s I Choose You, which began with a very specific professional hazard. People love booking Mavuso for weddings. The trouble is the songs they ask for. “They weren’t necessarily written with that intention. If you really break down the lyrics, you’re like: ‘Should this song be sung at a wedding?’”
Take Mvula, a song about the turmoil of a relationship that ends with choosing the person anyway. At weddings he quietly rewrites the lyrics on the spot because “words are so powerful and they can really create the reality that you have.”So he wrote a happy one.
“Now I can be booked for weddings without feeling any guilt about the lyrics I’m singing.”To launch it, he and his team spent September surprising brides with live performances.“No one knew we were doing these surprises until we arrived.” Imagine being a bride in the middle of seating-chart chaos when Langa Mavuso pitches up to choose you.
All of which lands as he marks 10 years in music. He released his debut EP, Liminal Sketches, in 2016, and when I ask what he recognises in the artist who made it, he doesn’t hesitate. “The truth and the vulnerability that still lives within me.”
What feels foreign is the shyness.
“Younger Langa was a bit shy, more reserved. This one you could even say is very extroverted."
Now he takes it on the road. The tour celebrates his decade, and it reunites his full eight-piece band for the first time since before Covid, including musicians he recruited straight out of high school.
“We get booked for these 30-min-ute gigs where people just want to hear the five songs they hear on the radio and we sing them quickly and we leave. This time we get to really go back to the roots but also introduce people to where we are now.”
Expect a two-hour journey from Liminal Sketches to The Other Side, with guests. Marcus Harvey, who opens, and Khanyi Mkhize join him at the first show at the Theatre of Marcellus at Emperors Palace on 24 October, and he’s hoping a friend or two pitches up in each city.
“It’s kind of my love letter to say thank you for holding on to me for all of this time. A decade is a long time and I love you all.”
After that: the Drama Theatre in Pretoria on 15 November, the Boardwalk ICC in Gqeberha on 21 November, and Movember Fest at the Ann Bryant Art Gallery in KuGompo City on 22 November. Cape Town and Durban dates are to be confirmed.
Before we hung up, I apologised that we couldn’t do coffee.
“Next time you owe me.” Fair. Next time it’s on me: in person, in a café, in front of a bookcase made of wood.