On a bus from east London to the south bank of the river Thames, Moses is stoked to find the top deck is entirely empty. He takes a selfie, sunglasses on, with the empty seats stretching out behind him. He does a lot of his lyric writing on the bus, he tells me — a habit that began when he was a child living in Accra, Ghana, catching public buses for two or three hours across the city to get to school. He composed most of Aromanticism’s lyrics while staying in remote, Wi-Fi-less cabins in the mountains of North Carolina and California.

Moses was born in San Bernardino, a city an hour east of L.A.; at the age of 10, his parents, both pastors, moved the family back to their home country of Ghana for six years. It was a time that was tinged with homesickness for him, defined by the CDs his dad would bring back from the U.S. Moses taught himself to sing by carefully copying the runs and adlibs of Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, and Usher. He wrote his own songs from the age of 12, but kept it a secret, hiding his songbook under his mattress. “None of my friends knew that I wanted to sing,” says Moses. “I was a loner; I’d ride my bike around with some other guys from the neighborhood sometimes, but I didn’t have a lot of school friends. But [Ghana] taught me how to spend time alone, which is something everybody needs to learn.”

After returning to the U.S. at 16, he went on to study creative writing at UCLA. At 20, he finally began sharing his privately honed folk music with audiences. He competed in a dorm room talent contest, joined an indie rock band, and eventually graduated to open mics in coffee shops off-campus. Via a college radio show he hosted, he struck up a friendship with KING, who invited him to open for them at an artist residency at the Bootleg Theater in 2013. After a few weeks of playing support for them, the room began filling with A&Rs and booking agents who came to see him. Word eventually spread to Dave Sitek, and later Solange, who invited him to play a Saint Heron showcase for New York Fashion Week in 2014. There, Moses met both the artist herself and Chris Taylor. While Moses’s craft comes from an isolated place, it’s also blossomed with the encouragement and support of others — a blessing he doesn’t take for granted.

ADVERTISEMENT

What was it like working on A Seat at the Table?

It was really fun, and it felt kind of spontaneous — Solange just texted me. This was actually before we were really close; she just asked if I’d come in and sing on something. She played me a bunch of songs from the record, and I was just like, Holy shit. I knew when I heard the record that it was earth-shifting. I had never really heard music like that. It felt like such a realization of her vision. Because I do a lot of vocal layering stuff, she was interested in me doing that kind of layering-slash-choir stuff on the record. So on the song “Mad,” there’s a bunch of layers, and because I sing in falsetto, there’s moments where you can’t really tell the difference between her voice and mine.

Do you see parallels in the way that you both work as artists?

ADVERTISEMENT

Yeah, totally. Meeting her has been really good confirmation for me, because there’s a lot of things where I’m like, Am I crazy? But she does the same shit! She really does control every aspect of what she does — she’s so involved in the visuals, the production, she writes all the songs herself, and that’s a big thing for me as well. I guess the thing I didn’t realize [before working with her] was that even though I’m not always the one literally sitting at the computer, all the ideas are coming from me. I’m directing them, and I’m guiding the sound when I’m working with an engineer.

There’s a way that male super-producers direct other producers, or direct engineers, and a lot of it is dictation. I’ve been in situations where this is happening, it’s like, “Press this, record this.” Seeing [Solange] and the way she dictates everything makes me realize I do literally the same thing when I’m in a session, and it really gave me a confidence to own that. First of all, women get this way more than men do, generally — the idea that they’re not the producers of their own music. But I think also when you’re a vocalist and that is your primary thing, and also when you’re a person of color, people are very quick to make you feel like your ideas belong to someone else. I got that a lot. So I felt a connection to what she does.