You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Michael Kuanuka is a singer-songwriter from London.
His second album, Love and Hate,
came out in 2016 and was named one of the best albums of the year from the BBC,
NME, The Guardian, GQ, and more.
One of the songs on the album was used as the theme for the hit HBO series Big Little Lies.
And in this episode, Michael breaks down the song Black Man in a White World.
He talks about how the song began, where it came from, and what the title means to him.
My name's Michael Kuranuka, and I'm a singer-songwriter from London.
The song started in the studio around November time, 2014.
I've only done two albums.
This is on the second album that's come out, Love and Hate.
I'd done the first album and I was struggling to make the second album.
I'd written all these songs, made what I thought was an album,
listened to it back and decided it wasn't good enough.
It was missing that excitement that you want to hear off an album.
So I was really dejected and stopped making music really.
I just thought maybe the first album was just luck.