Kelela, “Bank Head (Extended)”
“Bank Head” is a notable jam off of Los Angeles singer-songwriter Kelela’s debut mixtape, Cut 4 U, released this week. The whole album is streamable and available for download over at The Fader; you can also read her conversation with Rookie from last week, in which the 30-year-old former academic drops the following bit of knowledge: “It’s so important for people to know that nobody necessarily knows what they’re doing!” Kelela, for example, has no idea how she pulls off her own melody-based songwriting process:
She writes her songs in wordless gibberish, only retroactively grafting storylines onto the economical melodies that flow spontaneously from her brain. In the case of the Girl Unit-produced “Floor Show,” a sexy, pentatonic slow jam from her new mixtape, Cut 4 Me, it was actually UK beatsmith and track co-writer Mocky who deciphered the nonsense phrase she was singing on the chorus: “He’s like, ‘That part, play it one more time, and that part is, Till the end, till the end of time,’” Kelela remembers, emphatically widening her big round eyes in near-disbelief that another human being could have intuited what she was trying to say before she said it.