Sampha's Circle of Life

His first album tackled loss and made him a star. On his follow-up, he writes from a happier place: fatherhood.

- CRAIG JENKINS

SAMPHA SPEAKS in sketches, drawing out the general idea he’s angling at and circling back to add color and texture. You quickly understand how it could take this person years to locate the perfect sequence of words to encapsulate a complicated feeling, as his debut album, Process, does: “A nemesis, an enemy / You’re the crack inside the screen”; “Smashed this window in my heart / And I blamed you.” He’s a details man. Walking along Central Park West at the end of a balmy Juneteenth weekend, he was taken with the sound of an ice-cream truck’s jingle wandering off the correct key.

The English singer-songwriter and producer was in town for Satellite Business, bringing the concert series that began with two intimate gigs at London’s Hackney Church to the States, where he had not headlined a show in five years. He was anxious and feeling a bit rusty. “It’s been a long time since I performed my own music with a band,” he said as we circumvented the park the day before he took the stage at Red Hook’s Pioneer Works for the first of three consecutive nights. “I wanted to create a space that felt free, to try stuff out without the expectations of a huge headline show.” The objective was to introduce a new band, new songs, and thoughtful reconstructions of jams from his 2013 debut EP, Dual, and its more accomplished follow-up, the 2017 full-length Process, whose release, and Mercury Prize win, changed his life. That album was the realization of teenage dreams.