The world’s greatest songs. By the people who made them.
WIZTHEMC SONG: SHOW ME LOVE
On a hot summer’s day in Berlin last year, WizTheMC joined DJ/producer collective Bees & Honey in the studio to try out some ideas. Little did he know the session would result in his viral smash and UK No.3 hit Show Me Love, which has amassed nearly 200 million Spotify streams to date. Here, he muses on his journey, from financial struggles in LA to performing the track’s remix with Tyla at Coachella...
INTERVIEW: MIRANDA BARDSLEY
hen I resonate with a good melody, it’s like the song is already written. From that moment on, it’s my job to be intuitive, like there’s already a story to be told. That’s what it felt like with Show Me Love. The song came about in summer 2024 when I was in Berlin. I’d spent three months in LA trying to live there but I ran out of money. I was like, ‘Fuck, this plan isn’t working!’ So, I went back to Berlin, and my guys Bees & Honey – who I’ve been working with for years – and I started making some music. At the time I wished I was still in LA, but it’s funny how things turn out! The day we wrote Show Me Love, it was about 37°C, we were so hot and we’d already gone through two song ideas. At this point, we were a bit like, ‘OK, fuck it, let’s try something else then go home!’ So, we felt really free with it from the start. I’d been doing Afrobeats for just short of a year, so this was all very new, but I thought, ‘Let’s switch it up and try something.’ I start 99% of my sessions from scratch, and with this song, we started with keys. Alexej [Vlasenko, Bees & Honey] put some down and I immediately had an emotional reaction. The first line, ‘Your lovin’ on me makes me feel special’ came pretty quickly. When I’m writing, I’m not thinking, ‘This is a hit,’ it’s about how it feels, how I get goosebumps with us brainstorming all together. With this, I thought, ‘These keys are so good, we can’t just write anything – we need something that the keys are asking for.’ After that, we did the ‘I got so high…’ bit. It was going to be the chorus, but then we thought, ‘If we keep this as a pre-chorus, it’ll be the dopest pre ever!’ And so when I sang the chorus, the ‘Show me love…’ line, I don’t know where it came from, but it felt so good. In that one session, we did the verse, pre and chorus – the vocals on the track are from that day. We thought of going in the Afrohouse direction, so we sent it to DJs to mix and to see if anyone liked it – for months I didn’t actually know I was going to release it. Lots of DJs did like it, they sent versions of it over, but we realised we liked our version without the drums way more! At that point I’d started teasing it on TikTok, and everybody online was loving the demo, so we decided to do the second verse in the autumn, thinking we’d maybe put it out in December or
W 64 | Music Week
January. There was a bit of pressure with it now because it was getting attention, but it’s so cool working with the Bees & Honey guys because there’s no expectations in the studio, which allowed me to experiment and do a more rappy second verse. Overall, I did two sessions and then Bees & Honey tweaked some stuff. But the big question we were asking was, ‘Do we want drums?’ We were so close to putting it out without drums at all, but then I was with a friend in Cape Town and they were like, ‘There’s no four to the floor!’ So we added them in halfway through. It was exciting putting it out; every artist wants that moment where their music connects. But the release week? It felt like the most stressful week of my life! For a while I’d been getting a few hundred likes on my TikTok, then thousands, then that week every third or fourth video had millions of views. It was overwhelming. I had to wrap my head around the fact that five million people were seeing my face. I’d go through all the comments at first, then I had to learn to detach from it all. But it was still amazing. Then there was the Tyla remix. When the song took off, the Bees & Honey guys and I were all thinking about a remix and we had a couple of people on the list. It’s funny, we were naming names, then the song kept growing, so we started dreaming bigger. Tyla was the dream name we all thought of but didn’t want to mention! One day, I was at a writing camp and my manager called me and said Tyla wanted to do a remix, would I be up for a FaceTime? When I called her she was in the studio and showed me what she’d done so far. She was so cool. She sent the verse over, I loved it, then she asked me to play at Coachella! That day was such a rush. I met her, we kicked it, then we were on stage! It was mindblowing. I think the world is tired of manufactured music, and Show Me Love shows that. It has a pop-ness to it but it also has rawness and emotion – and a lot of Afro music is like that, I think. For me, I just hope it sets the foundation of what’s to come. I know that the song is bigger than me right now, so my goal is to get as many people as possible to fall in love with my whole journey.
I’m a music fan first, I’ve been inspired by so many things, and I just hope I can take my fans on a similar ride that other artists have taken me on.
musicweek.com
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