“Songwriting Keeps You Honest” The Halfway Kid Is Speaking The Truth
Tongue-tied and starry-eyed at the witty sparring of his mother and sisters in the kitchen of his West London childhood home. His dad’s demand for complete silence before embarking on a tale of high drama. Phoebe Bridgers’ “humour”, Nina Simone’s “intimacy and directness”. Sudan’s most famous folk singers, enchanting audiences not at mega-venues, but mid-party at somebody’s house in Khartoum.
This is a map of the storytellers that have shaped British-Sudanese musician Saeed Gadir. Now, the singer-songwriter, known by the moniker The Halfway Kid, is continuing on the legacy of sharing stories. Throughout our chat, he speaks with a considered, philosophical warmth: “I think of songwriting like joining chains. Like… how do you join with other people, and navigate these relationships in as much of an honest and truthful way as possible?”
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What is a story, who gets to tell it, and whose stories are being told? These are the questions asked by Gadir’s second album, ‘Myths In Modern Life’, which launched on October 18th, following his 2023 debut album ‘If I Don’t Come Home (Go To My House And Burn My Things)’. It steers through a search for identity and belonging, based on Gadir’s experience of living in the UK as his family suffered abroad in Sudan as the struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces escalated. These are songs that “take place outside your window, behind the yellow windows of the city.”
Throughout the album, Gadir dips in and out of a multi-genre tapestry of sound like a box of well-loved paints: from folk, to afrobeats, to grunge, to love-infatuated ballads, the breadth of noise was “a really fun thing” to play with. From start to finish, the album took just over a month to make. The speed of production was deliberate. Gadir had things to say, and wanted to still be feeling the things when the music came out.
“Songwriting keeps you honest,” he tells me, “because when you’re lying or talking bullshit, it affects the song, and then the song isn’t as good anymore.” Gadir feels lucky to have grown up in a house where there was a confidence in where he came from. But the album taught him to “feel even more confident than I had before, about who I was, where I came from, and how I could be that in the musical landscape as it is today.”
He wanted to paint the myth of city life in your 20’s – the struggles alongside the fleeting joys. “There’s not that many songs nowadays about what it’s like in London when rent is way too high, no one’s got any money… everyone’s struggling with jobs…” he trails off. “I wanted to talk about that, because that’s not just my experience. I’m willing to bet that’s loads of people’s experience.” In the opening track ‘To Get To The Other Side’, Gadir blends lively East African folk rhythms with a punk-tinged energy to tell these stories. He wants to document “the pressure it puts on your relationships… the expectations people have of each other, and that feeling of disappointment., that feeling of, these people had expectations of what they thought life was going to be like.”
But the way the album talks about pain is always run through with wit, tenderness and an invitation to come over and listen. “I wanted it to be an optimistic album,” he explains, “in the sense that even if I wanted to talk about those struggles, it’s still about wanting to come together. It’s making music as a hopeful act, not a cynical act.”
Listening to the album feels like coming in from a cold street to a room filled with laughter. Myths form the basis of culture, and Gadir’s music is about connection. But he doesn’t shy away from pain. ‘Anything To You’ is about falling in love at the same time as the war in Sudan was happening, and ‘Immigrant Song’ also reflects the atmosphere of the period. “Your world’s falling apart, but you’re still trying to be in love, or you’re still trying to be there for friends,” says Saeed. “I wanted to talk about that.”
In an article penned for The i, Saeed opened up about navigating chores like grocery shopping and going to work while his family were caught up in Khartoum in April 2023, when the war broke out across the country. At the time, the singer’s music was taking off, but his decision to cancel a major show was an easy one to make: “I couldn’t play when I didn’t know if my family were safe.”
As the media networks in Sudan collapsed, Saeed would monitor first-hand testimonies on social media to pass on information to his family in the capital. Three weeks later, they were able to make it to safety in Cairo. But for Saeed, the experience fundamentally changed the way he thinks about music. Now, there’s a deep sense of community with the audience – with people he’s never met feeling the same way he is.
For instance, he played a headline show at London’s Lafayette in October. “It was a really special crowd, a really special feeling,” Gadir smiles. “My gigs now have become these things where there’s a really generous atmosphere, and it feels really alive and spontaneous and not too self indulgent. It just feels like a real sense of release for me and my band on stage, and for the audience, so I feel really grateful for that.”
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It’s important, for Gadir, to reflect reality as accurately as possible and in a meaningful way. “That’s the feeling that excites me as a listener… when I’m listening to other people’s songs, when it feels like it’s happening outside my window,” he says. Stories, for Gadir, are what connect communities, whether it be family, friends, audiences or cross-country divides. For a long time, he lived in a living room with a community of East African guitarists and folksingers… photographers with day jobs, actors who’d sell you insurance and baristas who’d give you coffee if you hung out long enough. It was a “community of second-generation immigrants and first-generation ghosts”. He opens up: “You take a lot of myths and see where they match up to modern life, and you find yourself fallen into the gap. These are the songs that come from the gaps.” Storytelling is huge in his family. He fondly reminisces on the animated storytelling of his childhood home in England’s capital, and in Sudan, where he spent many summers visiting his grandparents. He recalls “laughing through pain and laughing through trauma and laughter being a healing thing.”
Gadir is inspired by the essence of folk music, which puts storytelling at the centre: “The core of what I do, the core of folk music in general, and the core of Sudanese folk music, are all consistent,” he says. In fact, the night of our chat, he’s scored a ticket to see Bob Dylan live at The Royal Albert Hall. He’s buzzing. The American songwriter’s influence on Gadir’s musical trajectory cannot be understated: “He’s really important in terms of storytelling, in terms of generosity, in terms of honesty,” Gadir grins, before adding, “his songs are also really fun.”
Gadir grew up listening to Sudanese folk music, with musicians like oud player Abdel Karim Alkabli (Kably) inspiring his music making today. “When I was a kid, the most famous, most important Sudanese folk singer, you don’t go and see them at, like, the O2 Khartoum (there is no O2 Khartoum), but you see them playing at someone’s house. You see them playing at a party, like, you see them in the community.”
In the West, there’s this idea that if everyone can access music, then it can’t be that good, he goes on to say. It’s as if the scarcity of the music is what makes it amazing. This is one reason he’s drawn to the Sudanese folk tradition: “It’s so personable, and it’s so direct. There’s no barrier, and everyone can access the music. But it still needs to be good.”
As Gadir grows in popularity, I imagine he’ll also want to keep his music accessible, rather than confining it to high stages, I chip in. Characteristically, he responds with a story. One time, before going on stage, his uncle who is an unofficial archiver of Sudanese folk music, said to him: “Singer sing”. “And that’s the great thing about all of this,” he insists. “You can just do your job, which is sing and write as much as you can, and that keeps you honest.”
But Gadir does more than simply “sing”. His music is a door that is always open. It invites you in, finding warmth, realness and poetry in stories that bring people together as a mirror for personal and collective reflection. ‘Myths In Modern Life’ is a connecting force.
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‘Myths In Modern Life’ is out now; catch The Halfway Kid touring independent venues in May. Stay in touch with The Halfway Kid online.
Words: Amelie Maurice-Jones
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