You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Michael Kunuka is a singer-songwriter from London. His second album, Love and Hate, came out in 2016

and was named one of the best albums of the year from the BBC, NME, the Guardian, GQ, and more.

One of the songs on the album was used as the theme for the hit HBO series Big Little Lies.

And in this episode, Michael breaks down the song Black Man in a White World. He talks about how the song began, where it came from, and what the title means to him.

My name's Michael Kunuka, and I'm a singer-songwriter from London.

The song started in the studio on November time, 2014.

I've only done two albums, this is on the second album, that's come out, Love and Hate. I've done the first album, and I was struggling to make the second album.

I'd written all these songs, made what I thought was an album, listened to it back, and decided it wasn't good enough.

It was missing that excitement that you want to hear off an album.

So I was really dejected and stopped making music really. I just thought, maybe the first album was just like the first few songs I wrote and they worked, but now it's come down to it.

I just don't have the ability. Everything doesn't sound good. I kept sending things into the label.

I was like, yeah, it's all right, but it's not really happening. And I knew it deep down.

And I was just sitting around. So my manager was like, why don't you work with Inflow? And I was like, who's Inflow? It's like, he's good.

And I hadn't collaborated very much with other producers or co-written really that much.

So I said, well, I'm not doing anything and nothing's happening. It's not like I've got any options.

So he made in Central London and we just talked for a couple of hours.

And I was like, this guy's really cool and seemed like a nice person. So let's go in the studio.

But I was really, really down. And I sometimes flow would call, but let's go to the studio.

And I just couldn't face being in the studio and listening to music that wasn't good enough all the time.

It's like, this is just depressing because it was like, how many good songs in years?

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