It’s impressive that at just 21-years-old, MNEK is one of the UK’s most prolific songwriting talents. Putting pen to paper for the likes of Rudimental, Gorgon City, Madonna, and Beyoncé, this man’s resume reads like an unrealistic wish list for the majority of aspiring songwriters.
But it’s not just all about songwriting. An established artist himself, aside from featuring on some of Rudimental’s biggest hits (‘Common Emotion’, ‘Baby’) and collaborating with Zara Larsson on their mega smash ‘Never Forget You’ - which currently sits around 181 million plays on YouTube - MNEK has a few records of his own that are pretty damn good. Releasing his Small Talk EP last year, it housed the hits ‘Wrote a Song About You’, ‘The Rhythm’, and ‘Every Little Word’.
Busy working on his debut album for Virgin/EMI - which he says will be out in 2017 - and having just released his latest single, ‘At Night (I Think About You)’, MNEK invited Gigwise to his studio in Shoreditch to discuss his upcoming new project, kitchen cutlery and the copyright controversy surrounding Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’.
Your new single is called ‘At Night (I Think About You)’. Was it literally birthed at night when you were thinking about someone?
“No. From time to time I have these ideas in my head and I voice note them, so I had the idea for the song already and I brought it to my boyfriend Brayton, and Ryan Ashley, who is a collaborator of mine that I love working with - he’s written a bunch of stuff on my new album - and they were like, ‘Yeah, let’s write something to it,’ and it became ‘At Night (I Think About You)’.”
So there was nothing in particular that inspired the record?
“No, because not all of my songs are autobiographical. If they were then I think I would be giving too much. I love creative writing but not all of my songs are that either, some of my songs are autobiographical, but this song is not that.”
You’ve been very successful as an artist who sells singles. You’ve sold millions of singles worldwide so what’s your stance on an album’s place in today’s market, is there still a place for them?
“You’re talking to someone who is literally in the process of making an album because I feel like I’ve been very misunderstood, because there’s been such an influx of me writing for other people and it’s been single, single, single. For me I’ve been misunderstood because I’ve had all of those singles so no one has really been able to get a grasp on who I am or my identity so I need to have a body of work that is me top to bottom. And that’s what albums are, you know what I mean? That’s the communication that artists have with their listeners, like a body of work that is instrumental to who they are and what they have to say.”
So your new album isn’t going to sound like a compilation driven by singles?
“It isn’t. Of course there are songs that I’ve written that are big pop tunes and they just happen to be the way they are but when it comes to the album I feel like there’s still going to be a glue to it. There’s going to be a synergy and a cohesiveness to it.”
Tell us more…
“It’s coming out next year. It’s released through Virgin/EMI here and Capitol in America. I’m looking forward to it because it’s a chance for people to understand me. I think I’ve released so many different things over the years and people have always put my name next to other names, which is really cool, really sweet and is great but it’s not fully me. And it’s not the best way for me to describe what I have to say. It’s just what people like to put out there and it’s in my press release and it’s whatever. I understand it’s to help sell me because the average person on the street doesn’t give a fuck about me if I’m just talking about myself but they care about Beyoncé, they care about Madonna, and they care about the people I’ve worked with.
“But I do wanna get to a point where they do give a fuck about me and if I have an album coming out and I have something to say they give a fuck about that, and that’s what this album is about. It’s about me broadening the understanding of who I am and it touches upon everything I’ve done over my career so far, from the really poppy stuff - working with The Saturdays, Beyoncé, Madonna, Kylie [Minogue], Zara [Larsson] - to what I’ve learnt working with Rudimental, Duke Dumont and Gorgon City, the dance world with a more underground edge. And it also touches on me as a kid, the new jack swing, the R&B, and what I’ve learnt via that as well.”
It seems like one of the main subject matters that appears time and time again in your music is love. Is that because your current relationship status is so good or is there another reason?
“I think people like love songs. I love to write love songs. I was just having a conversation about this yesterday, it’s easier to write sad breakup songs or love songs from a pessimistic point of view. It’s so much easier. I’m madly in love right now, I’m in a great relationship but at the same time I find it so difficult to be like, ‘I’m in love, I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It’s much easier for me to be like, ‘Oh you broke my heart and I’m so sad,’ because I love those kind of songs and apparently a lot of people love them too.”
They’re very relatable. Think about when you were growing up whenever you were going through something, whether it was a breakup or not, you would have had a song, right?
“Yeah and I want to make that kind of record for other people. But my thing is the juxtaposition, so I like to have the sad love song but I love to have an uptempo beat as well.”
Many people were introduced to you via Rudimental’s ‘Spoons’. How did you end up being on that record and what was the creative process of that song like?
“Wow! ‘Spoons’. Well, I had met Amir from Rudimental when I was 15 and we did a lot of sessions together, we worked on different projects and I really liked his energy. He then joined Rudimental - they were working out of Strongroom studio for a little bit early on - and I was working on various different things, you know? I was writing with people and doing sessions, I hadn’t really released anything by myself or with me singing on it really. I got in the studio with them and they were making this beat and Amir just happened to have some spoons and he needed some percussion for it and he was just tapping away - that is literally just cutlery recorded on the mic - and I wrote this really quick top line, they seemed to like it, and so they used it, and Syron sang her bit, which is basically my verse but they tweaked it a little bit.
“It was a turning point for me because I was 17 and I didn't really know what I wanted to say as an artist yet. I think having that song out there as the first representation of me that people were seeing, and because they responded to it so positively, it helped get the wheels in motion. And I loved working on that album. That whole album, the Home album was literally such a massive part of my life because it came out when I was 18. It came out when I was discovering myself and everything was falling into place.”
On Home, you featured on a couple of tracks and on Rudimental’s latest album, We the Generation, you feature on ‘Common Emotion’, do you always see yourself forever collaborating with them?
“They’re family! They’re in the studio next to mine whenever they’re not touring. I’ve written some stuff for their new album too. I’m always going to write with them because I love working with them, and whenever I do it’s always so natural. It doesn’t feel like work, it just feels almost like therapy in some regards.”
You recently retweeted a tweet that Skrillex put out denying that his and Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ record used a loop from Casey Dienel’s ‘Ring the Bell’ record. This type of thing is happening a lot now ever since Robin Thicke and Pharrell lost their copyright case to Marvin Gaye’s estate last year. Do you think this type of thing is stunting artists’ creativity because they’re worried they might get sued for the way a song feels?
“It’s hard. We can only try and make the freshest of music that we can make. It’s hard because with someone like that, when I first heard the original riff they were talking about that ‘Sorry’ apparently copied I was like, ‘No, that’s not true because it’s Julia Michaels who is singing that riff before Skrillex even posted the video I retweeted - he just basically confirmed it for me. There’s so much music in the world there’s gonna be some fucking creep saying, ‘Uh, this song sounds so similar to mine,’ and it’s just a coincidence.”
Then it just costs everyone a whole bunch of money for lawyers and suchlike…
“Yup. It’s called being bored and having too much money and wanting more money but then losing money. It’s exhausting.”
Has a track you’ve worked on ever been accused of copyright?
“Um, I’ve had to go to musicologists for certain things, but that’s been behind closed doors and hasn’t been anything that’s come out yet. I’ve learnt over the years to be very cautious of that stuff. If I’m sampling something I just have to be very clear about it. If I have written a melody and it sounds similar to something I have to just check it. It’s important.”
So is going to see a musicologist the answer to stopping this from happening in the future for al artists?
“Going to see a musicologist every time you make a tune is not conventional but when you have the feeling just go and check it over.”
MNEK’s ‘At Night (I Think About You)’ is out now on Virgin/EMI.
