Saturn returns at 29. Astrologers say it brings re-evaluation and change, a cosmic wake-up call. Time to choose a more considered path as the charms and delusions of youth waned. Masego’s 29th birthday found him in yet another foreign country chasing… something. Love? Glory? Money? Some other high? And wondering why.

The singer-songwriter mother who directed the church choir in Virginia, and the Jamaican father whose roots he retraced on 2020’s Studying Abroad EP. The teenaged hip-hop obsession, the university jazz studies, the birth of his bespoke genre, TrapHouseJazz, designed to digest all this and more; the narrative genius of Outkast, Duele; Djavan, the intoxicating Brazilian mystery of Trio Mocoto and Joao Gilberto… With Masego, all this accumulated inspiration has simply become the atmosphere that he breathes; the landscape for seeking deeper self-knowledge and purpose through music. With the input of an expanding cast of collaborators, it’s in a state of charged evolution.