When Chicago native Matt ‘Matthew Benson’ B began tracing his ancestry in 2019, he had no idea just how much his life was about to change. Seven years later, with two Grammy nominations and one win in the Best Global Music Album category for ALKEBULAN II with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (2025)—the follow up to ALKEBULAN (2023) in a trilogy of albums that have concurrently arisen as he’s retraced his lineage to current day Owerri, Imo State—leading up to his most recent offering, ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers (also with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), and a career that appears destined to be, Matt is still on this journey to reclaim his roots. Only now, he’s brought more people along.
On the 10-track album with notable features like Fatoumata Diawarra, Boy Spyce, Kabusa Oriental Choir, Camidoh, Goya Menor, and The Cavemen, he makes a case for a Pan-African diaspora. You almost cannot tell the singer from his earliest work, the auto-tune R&B package that is Matt B. 301B (2011), and might be stunned at the revelation that he had a Japanese career arc. But this also is Matt’s story, searching for meaning through music, until he eventually arrived ‘home.’
When we speak over a Google Meet call, it’s mid afternoon, and he’s a well of comments, breaking down aspects of this story from his studio. Matt touches on everything from Igbo Landing-adjacent mythos inspiring the album’s core to his collaborative process, dealing with skepticism about his motives, the cost of self-funding a cross-continental career, learning Igbo and Luganda, and the otherworldly genealogy that’s made him the singer he is today.
To start off on a light note, how is learning Igbo coming along?
Suffering. Still suffering. It has definitely been quite the journey. I’m not going to pretend as though I’ve been completely glued to learning Igbo. It’s a situation where I just really wanted to learn the language for the album, ALKEBULAN IIII: The Water Remembers. I found it important to sing in Igbo because of my Igbo roots. So it was very much a labour of love. After visiting Owerri, all the people were like, “You have to learn Igbo.” So, that is definitely on my bucket list of things to do as the new year comes in.
Since Igbo, Pidgin, and other languages on the album aren’t your primary languages, how did songwriting for the project work? Melodies first, translations after?
Of course, it wasn’t only Igbo. I had co-writers from East Africa and from Nigeria. I always told them to write in whatever languages they’re comfortable in and not just in English because I’m a native English speaker. I believe the story is in the melodies, especially if you’re even thinking about how international music is in this day and age. You get a better cadence when someone is writing in their native language because all languages have their vowel structure. So, while I’d write in English or Pidgin, some of my co-writers would write in Luganda or Igbo, and it was just this journey of translation to make sure we were getting the same level of understanding based on the topics.
How has the reception to the project been from fans at home and over here, family, friends, and everyone else?
The overall response has been overwhelmingly positive. And I think it’s because people can feel the heart behind the music. And that I’m not doing this for self-aggrandisement but to bridge the gap between my cultures, Africa and the rest of the world. A lot of times when people were listening from America, a lot of whom are of different creeds—Asian, Hispanic, Black—a lot of people in the diaspora where just thanking me for telling these powerful stories and creating this bridge of dialogue, and avenues for people to reflect on some of atrocities committed during the Transatlantic slave trade and the possibilities in the future. I’ve found that people from the continent appreciate that a Black American is willing to go so deep into his ancestry. A lot of people were very encouraging of the fact that I attempted to speak in Igbo, that the heart and passion is there.
In the past half-decade, there has been more cross-engagement with the diasporan Black community, particularly Black Americans. In your journey, did you ever bother about pushback from listeners here with regard to the scope of your music?
Of course, there was pushback. What is this person’s motive? Is this person a culture vulture? A lot of times you won’t even let a stranger into your house until that trust and rapport is built. That’s something I was ready for. Even as Black Americans, with our music going so far from Jazz to Blues to Hip-Hop, there are those who we aren’t so happy about their partaking because they might not necessarily do so in an honest, proper way. I’m African. I’m Black American. I can’t change where I was born. I can’t change the history that happened to my people. But what I do have control over is what I do and why I do it. So, for me, that’s what it was about: creating that cultural connection, speaking my truth, and for those who are still skeptical, I invite them to listen and experience my music. I don’t want to block such a person. I want to invite them to have a conversation because that’s where truth is
Kabusa Oriental Choir was a standout feature. And not that everyone from Fatoumata Diawarra to Boy Spyce to The Cavemen and Goya Menor wasn’t exciting, but that the Choir is quite niche and seeing them on an album of this scale was unexpected. How and why did you decide on that feature?
Kabusa Oriental Choir was the voice of the ancestors. They have such an incredible tone, so refined with what they do. We put them on the interludes to tell those stories and give something deeper than the uptempo songs. That brings me to one of the interludes they were featured on, OVERBOARD. I wrote that based off of something that happened during the 18th Century off the West Coast of Africa. This has happened in multiple regions but I wanted to speak about this particular incident when merchants came on the slave boats, presenting themselves as wanting to do trade on the continent and eventually they betrayed the people, taking them on slave boats through the middle passage to the Americas as slaves. But then there was a rebellion, where the Igbo slaves took hold of the ship, killed the slave masters and died by suicide because they felt it was better to die than live as slaves. What a powerful story! That story could not be told by anyone else on this album other than Kabusa Oriental Choir. And that’s why they were chosen.
It’s interesting that this is another representation of the ‘Igbo Landing’ and similar stories of suicide during the Transatlantic slave trade as with Lupe’s Drogas Wave and Nigerian rapper, Elveektor’s Nsibidi 2.
Oh, that I haven’t listened to. I’ll check it out.
You produce as well, right?
(Swivels to point at the production setup behind him) Yes, I do. Even with this album, a lot of the production I was setting the background for, which is a valuable ability to have. I’m big on bringing in other producers but also working on the music, to an extent.
Tell us about two standout moments from the production process for ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers, that aren’t leaving you anytime soon.
I’ll give you two. Initially, when working on the album, I struggled, and not necessarily the writing, because I already knew the story I wanted to tell, but about where the starting point was. And so, going into MY MOTHER’S SONG with Fatoumata Diawarra—which was rewritten like 5 or 6 times—the initial beat was up tempo, too fast, but I knew I liked what he sent me.
And so, I started playing around with it, asked for all of his stems, and eventually just used two of them. I took those two with this clicking sound and two or three blended percs (percussions) and then I slowed the tempo down, changed the key of the song, played around with the melodies and built the structure of the keyboard and all of the guitar parts. And eventually it started to morph into something that spoke to me. The song is based on the story of a little girl taken from Sierra Leone at 9-years-old. She held on to the memory of a burial song her mother taught her, passed it along to her descendants over the course of like a few hundred years, and then her descendants used that song and melody to find their way back home to Sierra Leone. That story inspired me. And I just kept playing around with it and it became MY MOTHER’S SONG, which I was honoured to have Fatoumata work on.
The second is OVERBOARD. I learnt about what happened with the merchants and I wanted to create music around it. While watching the movie Amistad (1997), I just kept replaying the opening scenes. They were on a slave ship and they just kept doing exactly what that story was referencing, taking over their captors but not committing the mass suicide. And that just kept playing on my screen as I was figuring out the melodies. Those two moments stand out because at that point, I knew I had something and it just kept flowing from there.
What does being a self-funded artist navigating the music industry across multiple continents look like? And what’s your advice for anyone considering that indie path?
This is a marathon and not a sprint. In this day and age as an artist, you can’t rely on other people to be as passionate about you, as you are, about you. If you think that someone is just going to waltz in and fund you without effort on your end, then you’re living in a dream world. Most people are hesitant to lend someone $10 or $15 because they don’t know if they’ll get it back. Now imagine a whole career. As amazing as the music industry is, it is a business. Your business hat should always remain on. In any other business, it wouldn’t make sense to fund a business with no guaranteed return. And so, if you, as an artist, want funding, then you must be willing to put in double or triple, in return. That looks like building out your own recording studio or learning the skillset that you can then do for free or discounted. Because then, you get to put yourself in a much better position on the negotiation table. When it comes to filming music videos, because I have my own cameras and edit and colour my own videos, in the grand scheme of things, myself and my wife, who’s also my manager, and my team, have so many skills that we can execute on a high level, across all spectrums, from fashion to videography.
Speaking of fashion, walk us through the creative direction for the album cover. Tribal paint. Stars. Cowries. Fur.
I’ll have to tip my hat to my manager, Angela. She’s so brilliant when it comes to those visual aspects of things. For me, I was happy to be there to just watch her in her brilliance. The significance of the cowrie shells ties to its use as a form of currency and a symbol of fertility, and was my way of honouring the ancestors. This is why I wore it as a breastplate and across my tattoos. The three tribal markings underneath my eye were a representation of my children—Matthew, Athena, and Noah—and honoring the legacy that I’ll leave behind. When you think of the title, “The Water Remembers,” that’s why we leaned into the ethereal spectrum and blue tones.
Angela: I’ll chime in for a second and say the stars are also a representation of the ancestors. The three markings also represent the ALKEBULAN trilogy.
If you could travel in time for a collaboration between an artist from the past and one from the present, which two artists would you work with?
I’ll go with more than two. First, I’ll go with my grandfather on my father’s side, who was from Mississippi, and whom I never got the chance to meet. He was active in the ‘30s when jazz and Blues did not exist. He was one of the people in the thick of the racist deep South. He and his brother allegedly made a deal with the Devil at the crossroads and they could play the guitar like no other. His brother was murdered at one of their shows at a salon and afterwards my grandfather vowed not to play a single instrument again. He became a pastor and forbade all of his offspring from being in the music industry. And so, going back to make music with him would probably be one of the best experiences I could have.
Also, my grandmother on my mother’s side, originally a Louisiana Creole, moved from the deep South to Chicago where she met my grandfather and joined the Pilgrim Baptist Church. There, she was in the choir with Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of Gospel music. What an incredible song that I possibly could have made with her in the 1940s and 1950s.
Another artist would be Michael Jackson, perhaps the best performer to ever do it. And off the cuff, Fela Kuti, as an inspiration. He helped to lay that foundation of what we know today as Afrobeats. Two more honourable mentions would be Buddy Guy and Richard Wright. And that’s because I found out through AncestryDNA that I’m related to both of them.
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