LARGE PLANTS
WHEN a Leyla McCalla wasteenager, her father introduced her to the music of Caetano Veloso, in particular his song “You Don’t Know Me”. “I loved his music and had always been fascinated when I learned of Veloso’s own experience of being exiled from Brazil in the early ‘70s,” says McCalla, a singer-songwriter and cellist living in New Orleans and a member of groundbreaking supergroup Our Native Daughters. When she was commissioned by Duke University to write music based on Radio Haiti—a station whose pioneering journalists investigated political corruption and were exiled, tortured, even assassinated – McCalla recorded a powerful cover of “You Don’t Know Me” as the lynchpin for her fourth solo album, Breaking The Thermometer. “The words to the song resonated so much with this experience and I felt it was a powerful way to tie in the parallel experiences of political persecution within the African diaspora.”
The Carrier GHOST BOX
She studied the history of Radio Haiti and incorporated clips from old broadcasts into her songs, which she sings in English and Haiti-Kreyòl. “A lot of the research that I did conjured visceral memories of Haiti. I wanted the album to feel like an immersive experience into those memories. The songs became a part of my personal journey to understanding Haiti.”
7/10
STEPHEN DEUSNER
Folk-rock gone spookily psych in Wolf person’s ’70s dream