Where has JC Muyonjo been all this time? Well, I know he is an art extraordinaire. He loves his pencils. He draws art pieces in 3D, 4D and all other Ds. His art portraits leap from their canvass. But this is not about his art, this is about his music. He is talented. I am sorry, he is multi-talented. Furthermore, he is an instrumentalist; his fingers work magic as his voice that is so sullen, smooth and a bit laid back, when he sings you feel your soul sneak out from your ears.
I stumbled across ‘You Know I Love You’. It sounds like a gospel ballad, but sod it, who says gospel is not good music? And You Know I Love You is a good song. It opens with a laidback instrumentation and a strum of a guitar with a voice crooning in its backyard. Muyonjo lifts the song and carries it on his shoulders and trudges with it along that good smorgasbord of instruments. He seems like pouring out his heart, teasing your ears, tenderly and delicately as though he is telling those words to a girl.
But later, he will mumble “Lord” and you sink in your chair. What does that tell you? The power of song writing. The lyrics to the song are, well, spot on and carry with them a message that the angels would clap their hands in delight and heap praise on God.
In this country, we are stuck with the ungainly bubblegum music yet good music is somewhere below the surface that when you scratch a bit, ululations will rip off the roof. And Mujonjo subscribes to this credo. He was cut from this same cloth; lads whose music hardly registers itself on the airwaves like its counterparts.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t take away the fact that good music speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Muyonjo’s music speaks for itself. Perhaps, dubbed headphone music, the kind you will listen to when your day has headed southern hemisphere leaving you blue and pale with self-hatred, and it will instantaneously illuminate your life.
I write this with a stiff, serious face. You Know I Love You is a darned good song. Good work, Muyonjo.
Listen to the song below.
Reviewed by Edd