Her most poignant release to date, lead single ‘Like Family’ is oozing with Samantha’s soul-tinged splendour from the offset. Years later – after her grandparents came to the UK in the late 1950’s – Samantha’s grandfather took them on a trip when she was a child to find his old childhood house on an old sugar plantation. The song is based on a moment, a strong memory, of seeing him cry as they found his old house in ruins. “My grandparents’ family life had been complicated and it was almost as if I watched all his childhood and adult memories and feelings, weaved between continents and centuries run across his face at that moment.As one of the first black Anglican vicars in the UK, he used the language of accepting our ‘human frailties’. The inheritance from him I want to nurture is the willingness to hold paradox, forgiveness and grace for ourselves, others and the world, rather than the tempting tendency to judge, condemn and tear people down.”

‘Shades of Yellow’ sits within the same thematic frame-work as ‘Like Family’ and was written to flow straight from its ending. Channeling the likes of Kae Tempest and Self Esteem, Samantha uses spoken word to match the power and emotion of the song’s origin, which emerged from a conversation with Samantha’s dad. “It was provoked by him noticing a picture of me that I had hanging in my kitchen as a little three year old girl, naked on a yellow bike, with yellow glasses on a summer afternoon,” Samantha elaborates. “The track echoes subtle reflections on the effects of trauma, generational divides and the connecting back to the innocent desires of our inner child. “Sometimes art is often a powerful way to express and name what’s been handed down, and in turn that is part of healing it and stopping the cycle”.

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This track was inspired by Samantha’s great uncle Robert Brown and his family, who moved to Canada in the 1970’s, along with thousands of middle class Jamaicans fleeing political and economic upheaval after independence from Britain rule.It narrates the emotional realities of migration and formative relationships that span continents.

Samantha elaborates, “it’s also a reflection on the phrase coined by Ian Patel: ‘we are here, because you were there’ and the causal relationship between post-war migration and empire. This reality was often left out of history lessons and our wider cultural narrative in the UK, just as climate breakdown and the controversial issues of illegal immigration are rarely linked and acknowledged now”. ‘Little Songbird’ is about remembering and bringing forth the capacity to create communities of solidarity, counterculture and resistance in the current climate of radical individualism.

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The single was inspired by the story of Lindo’s great, great grandfather Samuel Brown; a black Methodist minister from Barbados whose faith and knowledge of himself as a worthy child of God, enabled him to defy societal prejudice and pursue an interracial marriage to Ada – a white Scottish teacher and daughter of previous plantation owners – in 1891.

“I called the track ‘Worthy’ because that is what I receive from their story”, Lindo elaborates, “in a world where still so often we base worth and identity on outside appearances, I wanted to claim his courage to defy social norms and a worthiness that comes from an inner knowing, not an outward status or position”. Throughout the track, Lindo’s warm, soul-tinged vocal soars effortlessly over spiritual jazz soundscapes, allowing her impassioned lyrics to take centre stage.

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