Mali Music on quarantining with kids: ‘The iPad is the cause of much fury’

He's currently quarantining with his fiancée and three kids

Apr 17, 2020

Mali Music continues to create inspirational music on his own terms, and theGrio caught up with him to find out how the coronavirus quarantine is affecting his process while creating a new EP.

The three-time Grammy nominee who dropped “Let Go” a couple of months back, is known for melding his spiritually conscious lyrics with R&B and hip hop influences, resulting in a truly unique style.

This month, he’s featured on “Movin’ On,” an addictive new single from Jonathan McReynolds.

Mali Music

“I knew this day would come. The momentum and the need for me and Jonathan to create was so real and so needed that it just caught me in a corner,” he says of the collab. “That man was everywhere I was going, no matter what I would run into him.”

According to Mali Music, McReynolds was a bit of a perfectionist when they recorded the song in a hotel room in Orlando. “He wanted the perfect sound. He had covered m with four white blankets like we were in a prayer service. He was praying in tongues while draping me for us to get the perfect sound, just for him to strip them all off.”

Working on his upcoming EP while quarantined at home with his family is proving a bit difficult.

“It’s terrible, actually,” he says. “Moving, agreeing, communicating effectively, consistently, lovingly. Also communicating things that are important to you that you didn’t know mattered like space, attention. Close quarters really show you what’s up. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spread things out because a lot of what I’m doing is flooding the house.”

Mali Music

He’s currently quarantining with his fiancée and three kids.

“It’s a very eventful and fatiguing experience. I don’t know who to be mad at in the morning when Kids have to be up for Zoom school. I’ve been creating until 5 in the morning and my lady wakes up with a crook in her neck. We’re doing the morning shuffle,” he says before tackling the horrors of homeschooling.

“We’re spending money I want to spend on cut up steak for beef stew on supplies to make some moccasins for a project where she has to do that. This is my youngest, in third grade, who won’t let us not do it. She’ll go outside and get the grass off the ground or hair from under the sink to do this project,” he continues.

“The iPad is the cause of great fury and division. It has all the games on it and it’s in this cute butterfly case with wings that flap. Now one of the wings has been ripped off in the warfare,” he says. “Like, do they remember books?”

Aside from the dustups over electronics, Mali Music knows exactly how to keep his kids calm and uplifted during this uncertain time.

“The word of God, the word of God and the word of God. It’s a light into our pathways. It’s what will be able to get us through anything. All we have experienced before this great opposition was to show us the power and potential of the word. We’ve seen people healed from cancer and seen responses we can’t describe,” he says

“Just like Goliath, he was a new type of giant but all it took was one type of believer to knock him out. We may watch Prince of Egypt and point out how it is comparable to the word. I bring everything back to the word. I’ve been making the word digestible.”