And I was raised religious, so it’s like my operating system,” he says. “I’d been reading a lot about Judaism and Kabbalah and meditation. “They’re my favorite.” He found he kept circling back to themes of death and spirituality. “To not be so scared of failure.”ĬASE STUDY 01, his existential follow-up, is denser, headier, and riskier, confronting ideas like good and evil, life and death, loneliness, and God. “Everything dies, everything changes-I had to embrace that,” he says.
“For a while, I didn’t want to leave my house.” The thing that ultimately freed him from his creative rut was finding comfort in his own mortality.
“I got pretty depressed,” he tells Apple Music, citing artistic pressure, social media, and the isolation of fame as factors. After Daniel Caesar released his soul-baring debut album, Freudian, tracing his decision to leave home and the church at 17, he became one of R&B’s most promising poets, able to distill spiritual complexities into deceptively simple love songs.
