Capturing magic with Saul Williams

Only four words in, and Williams’ voice and his ethereal presence has already transcended my computer screen. If my interview with him hadn’t happened on Zoom, and if Zoom hadn’t reminded me our meeting would end abruptly after 40 minutes, I’d have thought we’d met on some other plane altogether. 

When we get settled into the moment, Williams and I start chatting about his new album, Leap Life, out 28 August. The title comes in part from the poet’s leap-year birthday, 29 February, and from questions about where that time disappears to each year, though the album itself is a journey through steeper terrain. 

The single, “Conspiracy”, was pre-released along with a video by director Cleon Arrey, who recently directed Snoop Dogg and Akeem Ali’s “You Want My All” vid, released last summer. The track itself is an accessible and exceptional portal into the rest of the album. The heavily sustained organ chords also seem to rise out of something larger, especially given the context of the album: what Williams describes as “communing with the dead.” 

One minute, the organ sounds reminiscent of a funeral hymn, referencing the artist’s attention to the ongoing loss of life and devastation in Gaza; a minute later, listeners find themselves carried elsewhere by a beat that demands action. Taken a step further, a deeper listen could also reflect vestiges of Williams’ upbringing as the son of a Baptist minister. 

While Leap Life is being touted as Williams’ first solo record in over a decade, the collaborative nature of the project seems far from it. Leap Life is part of a long history of significant collaborations that Williams has had in his three-decade career. His first album, Amethyst Rock Star (2001), was famously co-produced by Rick Rubin, with Musa Bailey and drum & bass trailblazer DJ Krust. He also worked alongside Trent Reznor on his 2007 record The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!.

Leap Life similarly features a powerful group of collaborators, including Massive Attack’s trip-hop mastermind Robert Del Naja, musician/poet Moor Mother, whom Pitchfork named “the poet laureate of the apocalypse,” psychedelic hip-hop artist Gonjasufi, and Williams’ wife – Rwandan actress, writer, and director Anisia Uzeyman. Uzeyman’s storytelling over Williams’ music on the eighth track “Une Photographie” is a standout. 

The reason it rises above the others is its simplicity. Uzeyman tells a story over Williams’ programmed drums, an unexpected musical accident. “I remember that day, at home in my little studio, and she was downstairs. I was like, would you just come in here? I’m gonna play music. Put on these headphones and just tell a story, I’ll leave the room – and she did it.” 

He continues, “What’s actually crazy is that I forgot I had programmed drums on those drums that come in. I thought they were on another track. I didn’t think they were there. So when I listened back to it, and the drums came in, it came as a complete surprise to me… I was so, so, so amazed by that.”

Synchronistic moments like those shaped Leap Life into a record that feels both intuitive and considered. Another one of Williams’ instincts was partnering again with his longtime producer friend Carlos Niño. Their previous collaboration, Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at Tree People, was entirely improvised. It inspired Williams to speak “to the moment” rather than deliberately reciting poetry. 

“The feeling on December 18, 2024, the day of the Tree People recording, was heavy. My decision there was, I have a lot of poems and I could read them, but it seems as if I need to just kind of speak to the moment. That’s when that began the process of me getting on stage and saying, ‘I’m not going to recite a poem. I’m just going to talk.’” 

“I’d voiced a lot of anger and angst online. I needed to switch gears,” Williams says, as he describes laying the foundation for Leap Life. In contrast to Tree People, the new project was more of a “synergistic mix” of tracks – some of which were thought out beforehand, and others born from improvisation. 

“Conspiracy” and other tracks like “The Dagger” and “Mazahua” were pieces of music he worked on during the pandemic, but “maybe 65–70% of the album is things that I wrote the night before or the week before,” he admits. “I went into the sound booth that day and just said what came to mind.” Once Niño got into the studio, Williams recalls, “he was like, you gotta include this, you gotta include this, you gotta include this.” When he heard “Une Photographie”, in particular, Williams mentions that he wasn’t sure whether to include it, but Niño said, “‘that’s on the album.’ Carlos and my wife Anisia have the same birthday, so there’s a lot of synergy between them.”

For Williams, the synchronicity between Niño and Uzeyman was yet another sign that the track needed to be included on the album, and reflecting on these moments during the recording process leads to a deeper discussion about music and ceremony. The poet lingers for a moment on how music and ceremonies have co-existed for centuries upon centuries, but in more micro terms, how that relationship has shown up in his career. “I remember when I was touring for my first album, Amethyst Rock Star, before I would get on stage, I would take off my shoes and treat the stage as a sacred space.” 

He also talks about another sacred moment when he toured with the Mars Volta in 2003. At that time, Williams was fresh off of Amethyst Rock Star, and opened for the band after their vocalist/sound technician Jeremy Ward tragically died of a drug overdose at age 27. 

“When I was on that tour, my father passed. While we were waiting for my father’s funeral, which they delayed for like a week, I decided to go back and do some more shows. When I was performing those shows I was like, ‘Shit! My dad’s here!’” He also describes how this feeling about unseen audience members arose in different locations: “I remember performing in certain places, like in South Africa or in Australia, and places where I have felt strong energy on the land, as if the audience was larger than the people [assembled].”

The unseen forces behind Leap Life feel present for listeners also, making the album a rich and visceral listening experience. The music and lyrics connect into what he describes as “ancestral grief” and, as mentioned, “communing with the dead.” Williams felt that he needed time with this album to really “dive into a kind of medicinal work,” and that it was a matter of “necessity.” He explains he really needed to rely on his “weapons of choice: music, poetry, and performance.” 

While the pandemic helped Williams form the bedrock of Leap Life, its finishing touches were added during another time of political overwhelm. Still, what Leap Life shows is how adept Williams is at leaning into the uncertainty of the present moment to create something intuitive and enlightening out of all the chaos.

“[Leap Life] was my most immediate response to what it would mean to be making music at this moment – the magic of the album is that, that sort of alchemical mixture, between that type of spontaneity and immediacy, and and all that’s happening at the time. We captured magic.”