We should put it on the album.’ My mother died when I was 11. I was really embarrassed about it, but I showed it to the boys and they were like, ‘This is beautiful. “It’s a window into my adolescence and some of the first writing I’d ever done, when I was 16 or 17. Below, Nai Palm discusses some of her favourite tracks on Choose Your Weapon. Still, the stories behind each song go far deeper than that. Paak and Chance the Rapper, among others. My favourite musicians are going to hear this.’” Songs from Choose Your Weapon quickly became a favourite of music’s who’s who-those who haven’t heard this album in full have likely heard it sampled on songs by Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Beyoncé, JAY-Z, Anderson. We had all this support from Prince and Erykah Badu and Questlove, and it really changed how I felt in the studio.
But I was 25, and we’d blown up pretty quickly. “When it happened the first time, we had Q-Tip on it and everything, but the second time around it was like, ‘Maybe we're doing something right,’” she says.
But it’s like when you watch a movie you love and then you watch it again after a while, you always notice something new.” There’s an immense level of detail and creativity that goes into each song by the Melbourne-based future-soul/jazz band, and it’s no surprise that their second album was also their second to receive a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Performance, for the song “Breathing Underwater”. “I think a lot of people miss all the details.
“Each song is its own little universe,” Nai Palm tells Apple Music about Hiatus Kaiyote’s approach to songwriting.