Uwade

Florilegium, the debut album from songwriter Uwade, begins with the spacious, aching “The Place in the Sky” — an open wound that begins in the aftermath of her beloved father’s passing in 2020, the oldest song on the record written in a fever dream of grief. It’s a fitting entry into the album, a garden-like collection of songs blooming from the last several metamorphic years. As much as Florilegium probes her own interiority and experiences, through each song Uwade builds little altars to the people and moments that amount to a life. Over the past few years it seems Uwade has been everywhere, quietly. Her emotive voice is what opens Fleet Foxes’ Grammy-nominated album, Shore; from there she’s gone on to tour extensively in support of the band, along with opening for R&B and indie stalwarts like Jamila Woods, Sylvan Esso, The Strokes and more. Her solo output included a handful of singles, like the buoyant “Do You See the Light Around Me?” and the more somber “The Man Who Sees Tomorrow.” But now, finally, comes a full-length entirely her own, a shimmering anthology that finds sweetness and light in sorrow, an amalgamation of disparate influences and recording sessions seamlessly fitting together through her expressive, expansive voice. Florilegium winds through genre, through death, break-ups, friendship, and failure. Here, she wanted to honor as much of herself as she could — her family and Nigerian heritage, her scholarly tendencies, her background in choirs, the literature that moves her, the melodies of artists like Fela Kuti, Yebba, and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, who inspired her to start writing songs at the inception of her music-making. Currently in her first year of a PhD program in California after studying Classics at Columbia and Oxford, it’s hard not to draw a throughline that Uwade does craft her songs with a studied, careful hand. Cerebral and curious, each musical moment feels tactile, deliberate, and thoughtful — but also fresh, like something just discovered. The record is an artifact of the way other people mold us — or how we’re molded even in their absence. She recounts traveling back to Nigeria for her father’s burial, faced with a foreboding feeling that she wouldn’t come back. As she reflects now, she recognizes why — part of her heart was now thousands of miles away — but it left room to expand. “Grief is quite transformative for people, and it was for me,” she says. “Changing in that way — stripping back the veils and excess that crowd life sometimes, and realizing, quite often it really is just about life and death. This is what’s in front of us.” Florilegium came together in three studio sessions broken up over a year and a half. It began in upstate New York in 2022 with Sam Cohen, after she spent a stretch touring heavily in support of Fleet Foxes. Early in 2024, her friend Jon Seale offered her a week at his studio space in New York City, where she further honed her ideas — and then she returned to her home state of North Carolina later that year, finishing the album with Alli Rogers at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s sun-soaked studio in Chapel Hill. Uwade felt decisive, empowered, completely in control of her own creative vision. On Florilegium, Uwade runs the gamut of genre. “Eventime” has a slowburn, R&B foundation, while both “Amenaghawon” and “Harmattan” emerged from a period where she was immersed in West African music, specifically afrobeats and string instruments that she found bordered on medieval European harpsichords. While tracking the drum solo in “Harmattan,” she shared with percussionist Jason Burger videos of an Esan dance masquerade called Egbabonelimhin that was performed during her father’s burial for reference; during his first few takes she got the chills. The resulting track is an album standout. We meet a new side of her musical aesthetic here too, more true-blue pop earworms. “Call It A Draw,” undulating with a breeziness, took a sharp turn from the darker, militaristic version she had initially demoed. She credits drummer TJ Maiani, who channeled a Tony Allen-esque Afrobeat energy, to helping usher in the final version. And “Clearer Through You” was initially a spacious, straight-ahead folk song before slowly transforming to the grooving, danceable cut, which would sound at home in Solange’s catalog next to “Losing You.” She thanks her mother for that. “My mom, every time she hears me play, asks me, ‘Why don’t you play a hot song, pick it up a little bit?’” Uwade says, laughing. “I think it’s because the music in Nigeria is very energetic and fun and alive. I had that in the back of my head while I was writing it.” Her mother even appears on record, on the outro of “Amenaghawon,” reciting Edo proverbs; the one from which the track takes its title translates roughly to “the water you will drink will not pass you by.” It’s an ode to Uwade’s place of origin, and path to the present. “I have always seen and understood myself in and through those closest to me,” she says; Florilegium feels like an relic of that, a bright, shimmering mirror, crystalline and true, reflecting the images of the people she’s known and loved and lost, just as much as it is an introduction to her as an artist. “I love changing,” she adds. “I love when things change, and I hate when things change, but I know it's so good, and it's so fruitful and so beautiful, and it's so sad. But without these moments of crisis, this all becomes a bit flat. You know, sometimes a little bit of chaos is beautiful.”