"One of the first stories I read as a child was the Odyssey and I instantly fell in love with the story."

Rapper, singer-songwriter and spoken word poet, Blue Saint has received many accolades for his music, community work and activism. Making under 30 lists for the Liverpool Echo and The Common Sense Network, he has a lot to say. So, let’s get started:

I’ve always been a lover of Greek mythology. One of the first stories I read as a child was the Odyssey and I instantly fell in love with the story. I loved reading the adventurous journey Odysseus goes through, just to make it back home, to what I interpret as a place of peace, love and stability. I believe it’s a great metaphor for life: life is a journey, full of highs and lows, and many obstacles, but keep pushing and you grow. In much the same way, my debut concept album Mémoire, is a journey through the highlights of my life, from my childhood and adolescence to my current age, both in Africa and the United Kingdom. When creating Mémoire I wanted to use as much floral and nature related imagery to showcase the theme of growth.

My song Calypso explores the idea of feeling stuck and isolated. It focuses on a character I created named Calypso, who personifies depression and lives in my paracosm Mynd. Calypso is the sea nymph in the Odyssey that detains Odysseus on her island Ogygia for seven years. A calypso orchid is also a type of flower. Ogygia is an island, Great Britain is an island, I live in Great Britain. The song is also closely related to another one of my songs called Lamith Tramell. Lamith Tramell is the personification of temptation and Calypso the personification of depression, and they both reside in my world Mynd, which is a portmanteau of 'my mind'.  

 

I’ve never been good at telling people exactly how I feel, due to the fact that I tend to think in images, in analogies and metaphors, in symbols and allegories and the like. Poetry allows me to get my thought across, in a way in which people can grasp. I view poetry as a painting. A poetic artist uses words as their palette to paint a picture of an idea, thought or feeling. You can make the picture your trying to draw complex and layered or as simple as you wish, and the audience draws their own interpretations. In a poem, you can say a lot with a little, poems heavily rely on emotive language, on illustrating to people what one is trying to convey, so I find it extremely useful using poetry when covering heavy topics and issues. 

I intend to drop my debut independent album Mémoire on all streaming platforms this autumn, on the 22nd September 2023. The album is already available exclusively on Bandcamp.  I’m looking to drop a small EP soon and intend to drop one single practically every month this year, so watch out for those. I’m then also working on my next conceptual musical project.

 

I began writing stories around the age of six or seven. Then that bled into me writing music around the age of seven, and then I began performing around the age of thirteen and I’ve been performing since. 

If I wasn't an artist I'd be in another field that’s still intellectually stimulating, and most likely still related to creativity, like a product design engineer, a graphic designer or a psychologist.

My ethos for navigating the music industry is... Do what you love, the rest will come. Don’t forget who you are, surround yourself by good people that will keep you grounded, trust in God, trust the process, try to remain consistent and follow your gut. That’s pretty much my only ethos.

 

The 2018 album I released, Mynd & Penus, is actually a double EP or compilation album. It combines two of my previous EP’s Enter Mynd, Part I and Enter Mynd, Part II: Sociation. The former EP was an introduction into my inner world; it was very fantastical, more abstract, and I would layer a lot of my thoughts and feelings with a large amount of metaphors and imagery. Creating music with layers is still something I like to do, however on my more recent songs I’ve become a lot more direct and vulnerable. In the past, I was a lot more afraid of revealing that side of myself.  

Enter Mynd, Part I (2014) was a mostly boom bap EP. Around the time I created Enter Mynd, Part II: Sociation (2015), I began experimenting with singing a lot more on my tracks, as opposed to just rapping, and also began focusing on the production side of my music, whilst digging deeper into neo-soul. On my latest album, Mémoire, I dug even deeper into singing and also began exploring and blending more genres in my music. In the future, I’m planning to create something experimental and focusing even more on music production, also I’ve been learning guitar, so want to get better at that.