Singer-songwriter Meklit Hadero talked with students about music, identity, and merging practicality and creativity into a successful career and a rewarding life.
After an hour of dishing out wisdom to an intimate gathering of aspiring student musicians in Little Nourse Theater, Meklit Hadero offers perhaps her most poignant piece of advice: Don’t give away your power.
“Early in my songwriting career, I had a muse,” she says. “He would appear and a song would appear. And I thought it was him, but it wasn’t. It was me. It took years to figure that out. It was about owning the creativity that I have in myself.”
Born in Ethiopia, Hadero grew up in the United States, graduated from Yale with a degree in political science, spent time in London and Seattle, and currently lives in San Francisco. Her music, which she calls “Ethio-jazz,” defies easy classification.
A busy performance schedule takes her across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Africa, yet Hadero routinely travels to college campuses to speak about her journey as an artist. “I think young people are hungry to find out about folks who are creating their own paths,” she says. “So I can connect with a computer science student who’s interested in making a startup, or a film student, or a literature student—anyone who wants to create something that doesn’t already exist.”
At the Carleton workshop, students ask about notions of permanence and impermanence, the importance of multiculturalism, and the differences between appreciation and appropriation. Hadero sometimes plays a song in answer to their questions. “It’s hard to talk about music,” she says, “and part of the reason is that we use music to talk about the things that are hard to talk about.”
Nevertheless, Hadero succeeds in putting her thoughts about music into words. She talks about how she finds music in unusual places—the sound of a pot lid rolling on the counter, or the melodic rise and fall of her first language, Amharic. She tells students how she worked with NASA astrophysicist Jon Jenkins to convert star-pulsation data into a rhythm and incorporated their twinkle into her music.
Hadero’s projects tend to merge music with other realms, like visual art, anthropology, and activism. For example, she cofounded the Nile Project, a musical collaboration with artists from all 11 countries of the Nile basin; the river that has often divided people through resource disputes becomes a common thread, a way to explore the confluence of the diverse musical traditions of East Africa. Her TED talk, “The Unexpected Beauty of Everyday Sounds,” has more than a million views.
Selam Nicola ’19 (Austin, Tex.), who was aware of Hadero’s projects and her residencies at Purdue and New York University, worked with the student activities office to bring Hadero to campus.
In addition to the workshop and giving a concert at the Cave, Hadero visited Professor Melinda Russell’s “Music of Africa” class, where she talked about Ethiopian music, instruments, and history. “It was empowering for me to finally learn about my own history in an academic setting,” says Nicola, who is also Ethiopian American.
After the concert, she and Hadero had a conversation about belonging and the importance of representation in a predominately white institution. “She said that there is space for everyone to be represented and celebrated,” says Nicola, “and if we want that space, we have to claim it.”
Before she became a songwriter, Hadero advocated for other artists as codirector of the Red Poppy Art House, a small concert venue in San Francisco where she honed one of her core creative philosophies. “The work I did making space for other artists to work and connect with their community came back to me a hundredfold,” she says. “You see a door, you open that door for as many people as possible. If you do that, a lot of people who didn’t have opportunities will get them.”
Hadero’s music provides opportunities for her listeners to embrace different facets of their identities, just as it incorporates a wide variety of styles and cultural influences. “In one of Meklit’s songs there was a line about growing up listening to Aster Aweke and Michael Jackson,” says Hayat Ahmed ’19 (South Orange, N.J.), who attended Hadero’s workshop. “Aster Aweke is a famous Ethiopian singer and Michael Jackson is obviously well known, so these artists were both significant parts of my life growing up as an Ethiopian American, as well. I felt like music I listened to was either the ‘Michael kind’ or the ‘Aster kind,’ and eventually I would have to pick one aspect of my identity. But Meklit’s music is for those of us who want both in our lives.”
Photo by Thomas Hiura ’17