Blood Orange:
A Personal History

Via social media, the 30-year-old musician behind the moniker Blood Orange has become a trusted first-responder and cultural commenter as people unpack moments like these. He’s a community- focused artist who mourns with his fans and engages with political movements like #BlackLivesMatter, and the art he creates further reflects on collective pain. His standalone 2015 tracks Sandra’s Smile and Do You See My Skin Through the Flames?, for example, directly engaged with tragedies such as the death of Sandra Bland in her jail cell and other acts of the police’s racially-motivated violence against young black people in America.

On his new Blood Orange album Freetown Sound, Hynes mixes the personal and political, naming the album after the capital of his father’s home country Sierra Leone and placing himself in his parents’ shoes to reflect their experiences as twenty-something African immigrants who relocated to the UK. “I moved to New York around the same age they moved to London,” he explains, speaking tenderly about the people who raised him. “I’m trying to picture that period and also relate it to now. The album is more of an exercise in thinking about yourself and family and timelines and bloodlines.”

The exercise arrives at both a professional and personal apex for Hynes, whose name has become synonymous with left-field pop quality. He’s hitting nearly a decade of living in New York City, and alongside his work as Blood Orange, he’s found rare success as a behind-the-scenes songwriting and production genius for the likes of Sky Ferriera, Solange Knowles and his dear friend Adam Bainbridge, aka Kindness. For the first time in his career, he can feel the weight of that rise. “I’ve never made an album for myself where I’ve known that even if there’s a small fraction of people, they will listen to it,” he admits.

With Phillip Glass’ Words Without Music in hand, Hynes is dressed comfortably in a black basketball shirt and a t-shirt for the muggy Thursday evening he’s spending in DeSalvio Park, a bustling NoLita playground rife with teens and kids playing basketball in the small open corner that’s surrounded by Italian pubs and restaurants. Urban parks are an important part of his experience in Manhattan; he wrote lyrics for Freetown in DeSalvio and Washington Square Park, enjoying the happy medium between the hectic atmosphere of the city and the brief taste of nature.

“I like to sit in the city,” he muses. “I can’t go upstate, that gives me a panic attack. I’m happy to go to weirdly overcrowded parks.” As a resident of NYC, he’s found more unity here than in East London where he grew up. “There’s crazy racism where I’m from [and] I was bullied by black kids so I felt so displaced,” he tells me. “I really only recovered from that in the last few years.”

At a young age, a self-taught appreciation for black history turned out to be a source of solace, and Hynes wondered constantly if the bullying could have subsided if that history had been taught in his school, if the lessons could have unified his black classmates instead of making him feel displaced. “Even if it’s not taught in public schools here, there’s still an awareness of what people have been through,” he says of the difference between America and the UK’s approach to educating black history.

Still, his twenties being spent in America have been highlighted by the racial tension the country has experienced over that time, specifically the near-constant news stories of mass shootings and deaths of primarily young black men at the hands of white police officers. “There’s no real other place where you’re made to be aware of your place as a minority than in America,” he says. “That’s been interesting.”

While 2013’s Cupid Deluxe – Hynes’ acclaimed sophomore album as Blood Orange – served as a love letter to his adult home of NYC, his latest goes back to his familial roots and pays tribute to how childhood and his parents’ histories have shaped his perspective. Songs like Augustine blend tropes of West African Christianity with direct references to the death of Trayvon Martin. “Cry and burst my deafness,” he sings, directly quoting St. Augustine, “while Trayvon falls asleep.” Elsewhere, on the song Love Ya, he unites his parents musically by reworking a song by the artist Eddie Grant, who hails from Guyana just like Hynes’ mother, while also sampling a Freetown woman speaking in Krio about her faith in God as her village is destroyed by rebels.

“I won’t ever actually know what my mum and dad’s twenties were like,” he says while noting that he has not yet been to the city of his album’s namesake. “I’m imagining and trying to relate [their experience] back to mine.”