Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 5 weeks ago
Angel Dweh left Liberia for Pennsylvania as a child. Over the following decade he builds a music career entirely on his own terms — his own label, his own sound, his own rooms — releasing three EPs that move from introduction, to confession, to something stripped bare. The film traces the sound back further than he does. A century earlier, Kru sailors from the Liberian coast worked European ships as free crew and came home with guitars, playing them in a two-finger style that travelled port to port and became the foundation of West African popular music. Across conversations with Dweh and the people who record him, a portrait emerges of an artist who keeps his life private and reveals himself only through lyrics and, having made it somewhere new, turns back toward the country he came from.
Transcript
00:04I have to find my own voice.
00:07Everybody want to sound like the next Whiskey.
00:09Everybody want to sound like the next Bono Boy.
00:12Everybody want to sound like the next Tiwasabi.
00:15So for me, I really have to navigate my own sound
00:19and create something I represent.
00:33Singing, it kind of like resonated with me and my siblings
00:36because that's what we were raised with.
00:38So being in Liberia, music is used as a tool to communicate.
00:46People should expect growth as a person in my, I think, itself.
00:54You know, the evolving of the journey.
01:05Can you sort of give me an idea of what viewers can expect from the film?
01:14Transformation.
01:17Stop voting.
01:30Design.

Recommended