Mahalia rises from the ashes

At the time of my interview with Mahalia Burkmar, known to the world simply as Mahalia, we’re leaving behind the Baltic temperatures of January and heading into the final month of winter, with the potential of brighter days peeking tantalisingly over the horizon. Dry January is over for most, but for the singer-songwriter her period of abstaining from alcohol has only just begun – and with good reason. Mahalia is just two weeks away from embarking on a 24-date North American tour. “I don’t really drink that much, but I do love a glass of wine at home,” she tells me. “So just before touring, that all stops and I have to be super focused on diet, exercise and all the wellness stuff.” Still, even with that in mind, there’s no time to rest, and she finds herself in a cab on her way to the studio for a midday session.

Long before Mahalia was selling out shows across the globe, she was busking in various cities across the UK at only 13, travelling from her hometown of Leicester. “At that time, you didn’t have a placard with your Instagram QR code – you were really in the streets just singing and hoping that somebody would either drop a couple of quid in the guitar case or come and say something nice.” But what Mahalia didn’t know at the time was her life was about to undergo a drastic change. Around the time she released her first EP, Head Space, on Soundcloud in 2012, Mahalia’s mother introduced her to the songwriter Amy Wadge. “She had written a bunch of stuff with Ed Sheeran. He has an EP called Songs I Wrote with Amy, which he made with her,” Mahalia says. “I was a massive fan of his, and so she would take me to all of his shows, and at one of them I actually met him. I walked in, we had a picture, he gave me a T-shirt and we spoke – it was lovely. And then he tweeted, ‘Everyone check out this 13-year-old girl’, and everything went crazy from there.”

After only just becoming a teenager, a time when usually your biggest worry is how much pocket money you’ll get from your parents, Mahalia found herself signed to Asylum Records – an offshoot of Warner Music Group. Considering we hear plenty of horror stories of labels taking advantage of young talent, I’m intrigued to see just exactly how Mahalia feels about it all. “I’m really happy that I signed so young because I think I learnt so much growing up in the industry, and now I’m equipped with all of this knowledge that not many people have when they’re 25 and only just signing to a label. TikTok wasn’t there, I wasn’t really on Instagram, and you could just make music without all this extra stuff around it, which I do really miss.” However, Mahalia admits that watching a big label carefully scrutinising all of your releases draws up feelings of frustration. “I think it’s quite challenging to create art and then give it to ten people to critique before you can release it – that’s always been the hardest part for me.”

In 2016, she released her first project on the label, Diary of Me, an early sign of her penchant for soulful love songs. Her big break happened in 2017, when a video of her performing the sultry, throwback R&B track “Sober” went viral, rapidly amassing more than 50 million views. She kept up that momentum the following year, releasing her EP Seasons, with its five tracks each depicting a different stage of romantic entanglements. Though she was already approaching a decade in the industry, in 2019 she released the album considered her debut: Love and Compromise. It acted as a fresh introduction, landing her multiple nods at the Brits for best R&B performance. However, the pandemic crushed her touring aspirations six months after the album’s release. And throughout a tumultuous lockdown, Mahalia struggled to rediscover her creative spark, questioning if it would ever return. “I was having a really, really bad time,” she recalls. “For all these years, I’ve been able to communicate and share my feelings, whether that be through music or even just with my friends and family. And then, in the pandemic, I suppose just because we were all stuck inside, I think it made me have this block that I’d never really experienced before.”

Thankfully, when studios reopened in 2021, the musician captured lightning in a bottle in the form of her latest album, IRL, which was released in July last year. “All in all, it took three years to make, and I’d never really understood the term ‘labour of love’ until I made IRL,” she says. “That’s exactly what it was.” The 13-track record highlights her polish as a songwriter, and she unabashedly shares her wins and losses during the pandemic. With songs highlighting everything from the confidence she found during therapy sessions to relationship trauma she thought she’d already resolved, IRL is Mahalia at her most authentic and daring self. “Tryna stay stable, it’s hard when I’m tryna keep my place at the table,” she sings with buttery-smooth vocals on the atmospheric opener, “Ready”, a line that sums up the sinking feeling the singer felt during that turbulent period of her life. “I’m always hoping people have heard that lyric. I was in a short-term relationship that ended pretty soon into lockdown, and I was just going through it,” Mahalia says. “I kept being asked to post and be present online, and I was like, ‘Guys, this is really tough for me right now.’ I didn’t know how to stay relevant with all this shit going on in my mind, and it was worrying for me because up until this point I’d never really struggled with mental health before. How do I keep a seat at the table if I’m just in fight or flight mode constantly?”

Another issue Mahalia got to grips with on the record was her tendency to be a people pleaser. On the raw and unfiltered “Lose Lose” she tells her partner: “I don’t wanna have to choose me over you.” “I think a lot of that actually comes down to where I grew up and it not being so diverse
– I think I was always just trying to fit in and sink into the background,” Mahalia says. “I didn’t want people to look at me, because they already were because of my skin and looking different to them. So I was really trying to take a step back, and then I did that in my relationships and in my friendships, and I was always putting guys above myself.”

For Mahalia, IRL was a confessional project – a result of prolonged reflection and healing immortalised on wax. However, she possibly wouldn’t have been able to produce such an honest and refined record had it not been for the soul-searching she did with her therapist. “There were about five or six songs that came from sessions with my therapist,” she says. “I overcame a lot in therapy. Just being able to have some space to talk freely and not be afraid that the person I was talking to would be hurt by what I said was amazing for me.” When quizzed about the most valuable takeaway these sessions gave her, her answer is simple: “Not to react too quickly. I used to make quick decisions based on fleeting feelings, and then I always regretted them. My therapist told me to sit in emotion, and if something still pisses me off a day later, then voice it, but most of the time it passes. Since I’ve learnt that, it’s helped me in so many scenarios and situations.”