‘Nourished and Replenished’: Meklit’s New EP Delivers an Antidote for Uncertain Times

“Everyday dreaming, everyday songs / Everyday pushing, we keep keeping on,” sings Meklit on “Antidote,” the first track on the San Francisco musician’s new EP, as a hopeful saxophone line from Howard Wiley rises up behind her. “Everyday passage, everyday bread / You yourself are an offer, turn the world on its head.”

It’s classic Meklit, finding beauty in the mundane — a thread that runs through most of her work. The Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter, who’s earned critical acclaim for her inventive blend of jazz, folk and East African music, is a true Bay Area multihyphenate. A speaker, scholar and organizer, she’s been a TED Senior Fellow, founded the nonprofit Nile Project and held a programming role at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until 2022. Her podcast and performance series Movement, which debuted in 2020 nationwide on PRX’s The World, explores stories of migration and the malleable concept of home.

But, man, does it feel like an extra special gift when she decides to release new music. Ethio Blue, out Friday, March 8, is Meklit’s first release in seven years. She’ll celebrate it with a full-band live show at San Francisco’s Brava theater on Saturday, March 9.

On first listen, one might assume the collection of six songs is a pandemic album. These songs play with grief and hope; they’re unmistakably intimate, introspective and tender, even as funk grooves lock into place, percussion builds to epic proportions and Meklit’s vocal power fills the room.

That assumption would be wrong: Meklit wrote and recorded most of these songs in 2019, while on the verge of becoming a first-time mother, and trying to process the daily horrors of the Trump Administration.

“I was thinking about what kind of world I wanted this child to be in,” recalls the songwriter of that tumultuous time. “And then every other week there would be a new way of assaulting immigrants, or assaulting women, and everyone just seemed so worn down … I wanted to write healing songs, to help people feel nourished and replenished, remind people of their strengths and capacities and power.”

To that end, she sought out sounds and words that made her feel nourished. The track “Hagere Ethiopia,” which she sings in Amharic, was born of a lyrical collaboration with Alemtsehay Wedajo, a longtime poet, theater actress and activist whom Meklit describes as a giant in contemporary Ethiopian art and culture.

“She was so openhearted and excited about it,” says Meklit. The upbeat song, adapted from a poem of Wedajo’s, names rivers, caves and other ecological features of Ethiopia, describing them as precious heirlooms. “She’s so powerful, and in Ethiopia she’s a legend, but because she’s not writing in English she’s not really known here. I wanted to acknowledge her … and honor our women heroes, who often don’t get acknowledged while they’re still alive.”

Elsewhere, Meklit drew inspiration from right outside her window: “Birdsong” pulls its melody and feel from, yes, a bird the singer recorded one morning; there’s also a stunning clarinet part from Ismail Lumanovski that sounds like a flight path. The production, from Dan Wilson (Jon Batiste, Leon Bridges, John Legend), is somehow both earthy and pristine.

Five years after she wrote these songs, some things have changed: the quietude of pregnancy has been replaced by the joyful cacophony of a 4-year-old, who often accompanies his parents — Meklit and her partner, percussionist Marco Peris Coppola — on the road. But Ethio Blue’s determined hope in the face of uncertainty has persisted, and, in these songs, aged quite well.

“We have all kinds of reasons to feel terrified,” acknowledges Meklit, noting that the specter of Trump once again hangs over the national mood. And yet “there’s also never been more space for me in the public sphere, as an African woman, as a Black woman, as an immigrant woman. … For me, it’s thinking about places where our power is expanding, our abilities to shape worlds for ourselves.”

Music helps, she says, by forcing her to stay present — and she hopes to offer the same to people who come to her shows.

“Look at the neuroscience of what’s happening at a show: our brains are doing entrainment, syncing up with the rhythm, so our brain waves are moving together. We’re singing, so our breath is moving together,” says the artist.

“We have the things we need to make us feel connected in our own well-being, and our own sense of possibility,” she adds. “We just have to remember them.”

Meklit performs her EP release show at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 9, at Brava Theater (2789 24th St.) in San Francisco. Oakland’s LoCura opens. Tickets ($25 and up) and more info here.