NNAMDÏ – Please Have a Seat LP Sooper Records

As an artist, composer, producer, writer, and co-founder of Sooper Records, so much of NNAMDÏ’s life is go/go/go, do/do/do, produce/produce/produce, with precious little time to stop. Take a Breath. Have a Seat. Please Have a Seat finds NNAMDÏ writing through those calmer moments as he’s been able to capture them; to sit down, pause, and write twelve songs. If there is comfort here among the common themes, it’s the comfort in finding wisdom and gaining confidence. Pausing, but also knowing there maybe is no real pause, that every moment is one to grow as a human, to reflect or learn. In fact, Please Have a Seat is bookended by two songs about running, about finding those moments in motion, getting out of go-brain and into something deeper, more elemental. That these are pop songs to NNAMDÏ is telling; the hooks are there, melodies and chorus lines that make Please Have a Seat warm and inviting. But the articulations are nonlinear, and NNAMDÏ’s Please Have a Seat isn’t a story or narrative collection so much as an incantation, a conjuring of elements with an almost synesthetic quality. Sounds, styles and themes crisscross into focus, giving a glimpse into NNAMDÏ’s inspiration and inviting us to please have a seat ourselves, to make our own moment and our own meaning of it. With Please Have a Seat, NNAMDÏ doesn’t so much tell a story as show us the power of it’s requisite pieces.