Grammy-nominated American vocalist, composer, actor, and playwright of Ugandan-Rwandan origin, Somi recently released her latest album, What Does It Take to Bloom?, through her independent label, Salon Africana. Somi has spent her career mapping cities and legacies through music. On her new album, though, she turned the lens on herself for the first time, and the result feels like her most personal work yet.
Between a surprise Nigerian collaboration and years of academic research into African women’s musical legacies, this project pulls from more places than any of her previous records. Here’s what she shared about it.
Somi’s New Album Turns The Lens Inward
The Grammy-nominated Ugandan-Rwandan vocalist, composer, actor, and playwright released What Does It Take To Bloom? in August 2026.
Previously, Somi mapped places through her music, from Lagos on The Lagos Music Salon to Harlem on Petite Afrique and Miriam Makeba’s legacy on Zenzile. This time, she says, the project became a mapping of herself instead.
She recently completed a PhD at Harvard examining African women’s voices in music, discovering a striking gap in serious scholarship on Makeba compared to artists like Nina Simone. That gap, she says, shaped how she thinks about her own place in music history.
How The Album Came Together, And Why She Doesn’t Fit Neatly Into One Genre
Somi’s original plan was to travel through different African countries, working with a new producer in each one, starting in Senegal before moving to Nigeria.
There, a planned collaboration with Benjamin James of The Cavemen kept expanding until it became the full song “Sometimes Love,” with its lyric video filmed at Kaswa Lodge Farm and Tea Plantation in Fort Portal, Uganda.
Other standout tracks include “So You Want To Be A Woman” with Lakecia Benjamin and “Interlude: Skin To Skin” with Senegalese guitarist Hervé Samb. Somi says her brother once suggested that the tension between all these musical worlds might be the interesting part, and the thought stayed with her.
“I wrote this body of work while traversing many places and losing many people. This album is a mirror of searching for where and how to take root in spite of that. I pray these songs offer each listener a sense of Home or, at the very least, a witnessing of me coming Home to myself.”
“I didn’t know that I was going to in the end be like, ‘Oh, this is actually just a mapping of myself,’”
“Sometimes it can be quite frustrating that you don’t feel like you belong in this or that,” she says, “but I’m also good with standing in the middle.”
“The jazz economy has given me a career,
“I didn’t set out to be a jazz singer per se,” she says. “I’m a song maker first and foremost. I’m an African woman, and I’m a song maker and a storyteller.”
“It’s about coming home to myself,” she says. “Home is actually always going to be in the music.”
While she does not reject the jazz label, she describes herself first as a songwriter and storyteller. For Somi, this album is about coming home to herself. Which What Does It Take To Bloom? track speaks to you most?
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by Invest
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