Khatumu
When Khatumu found herself stuck in Brazil during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the half-German, half-Sierra Leonean, first-generation American had no idea she was about to kickstart a creative journey, let alone one that unfurls through folk- and Americana-inflected indie. Just 20 years old and traveling to visit family friends in the midst of her studies at Yale, Khatumu Tuchscherer needed to find a way to use her surprise downtime. “I saw a video on YouTube of Dayglow going through his workstation, stem by stem, and I just thought, ‘I could do that!’” she recalls with a mischievous grin. “It became eight hours a day for more than a year, just learning how to produce and write, how to play guitar and sing on top of it.” The results of that experimentation have paid off quickly, with social media and streaming virality for her first single, as well as fans praising her ability to reach the emotionally honest highs of artists like Phoebe Bridgers and the sky-cracking experimentation of Mk.Gee. On her new EP Free Therapy (due June 27th via Bright Antenna Records), Khatumu sets intimate details from her life to golden compositions, inviting listeners along for the radiant soul-searching.
Once she returned to Yale for her final year of studies, Khatumu decided to pursue music more fully, taking her first songwriting class and joining a Bob Dylan inspired folk music singing group. “I was singing about middle America and coal mining, and fell in love with matter-of-fact storytelling” she says. Due to her father’s career as a renowned linguist, Khatumu and her family lived and traveled through West and Central Africa before settling outside of New York.
By collecting the many different musical shards she’d experienced across her childhood and filtering them through this new folk exploration, Khatumu’s creativity found a new, honest strength.
One listen to the lithe and charming “Sober” reveals the Americana tendrils running through Free Therapy. Sturdy acoustic guitar plucking and tight harmonies provide the perfect base for Khatumu’s serene vocals, leaving her room to digest both her vices and her relationships. “I was living with a friend, and he had just broken up with his girlfriend, and we were just constantly talking and drinking,” she says. “The way alcohol feels appropriate in the social context of college is so different from ‘real life.’ I’ve been trying to navigate that.” The crackling “Fire Drill” ups that ante, adding circular banjo to amplify the warmth. “Carried you to the bathroom/ A side road and a racist statue/ Too late to revise it now,” she sighs, the breezeblock percussion inescapable.
Since graduating from Yale— where she was asked by the university president to write and perform a song for the 2024 class commencement —Khatumu has relocated to Los Angeles, where she wrote the five songs for Free Therapy. Without any connections in the city or an enforced structure, she’s found herself experimenting more freely and thinking more deeply about how her life is changing. “A lot of the songs are about leaving behind people, habits, and things that aren’t right for me anymore,” she says. The starry skies of “Departure Time” embody that theme, Khatumu strumming her way through the end of a doomed relationship as she leaves New York. “See I’m paler than a cloud/ Kidnapped by the feeling that I could do better now/ Than a simple life/ So It’s departure time,” she cries out, the layered vocals giving way to an airplane engine roar of reverb.
While these songs hold depth and maturity far beyond what one might expect from a young songwriter, this is only the start of Khatumu’s emotional excavation. Only a few years into discovering her musical identity, her clever songwriting and incisive lyricism display an ability to reach across an unfathomable emotional spectrum. She is a mosaic. “I’ve written about 20 more songs that I love, demos that are ready to go," she says. "Graduating, moving to LA, it's been a crazy transition trying to navigate life and I'm feeling so much.” Both an open-hearted assessment of young adulthood’s messiness and a promise of a brighter future, Free Therapy solidifies Khatumu as a thrilling young songwriter worth watching for years to come.