Be true to yourself and die a Viking

We got to meet music artist Blu Samu recently; to be frank, we were instantly captivated by her poetic rawness. Real name Salomé Dos Santos, the Portuguese-born is a creative at heart with an outspoken affinity for wisdom. Raised by her single mom, life for Blu Samu has not always been rainbows and butterflies. When she was a kid, she moved to Antwerp and then back to Portugal to once again return to Antwerp. Now she calls Brussels her home, where she has found like-minded souls and collaborators, such as Zwangere Guy, Le77 and Miss Angel. Blu Samu dropped EP “Moka” and the freshly released “ctrl-alt-del”, and she has already graced the stages of Dour Festival, Eurosonic Noorderslag, has performed in Brazil and can be found at this year’s Pukkelpop. Her sound is a mixture of funk, hip-hop, R&B, jazz and neo-soul, promising to truly sway you away. Get in the know about the aspiring performer as we talk hardship as inspiration, “saudade”, and liberation through performance.

We’ve entered a new decade more than two week ago. What would you love to see happen or change in the coming ten years?

I’d love to see us all unite as human beings and fight the 1% that are hurting the world because of their hunger for power.

Apart from music, do you have any other aspirations or things you want to learn?

Video editing and philosophy. I’ve always been quite the geek. When I was younger, I used to make music videos with my favourite animes. I liked it a lot, because it’s another way of playing with rhythm and telling a story. Philosophy interests me more on a human level. I love to think about life, why we are here, and how we can fulfil ourselves and those about whom we care about the most. I think philosophy can be a nice tool for that.

Do you have a code that you try to live by?

Always try to be true to you.

How and when did your love for words start? What kind of impact do words, in the broadest sense of the word (pun intended!), have on your reality?

I’d keep a diary ever since I was 6. When I was thirteen, I started writing fantasy and sci-fi stories, and later that turned into poetry, which then turned into slam poetry and eventually ended up in the form of my lyrics today. It’s safe to say I love words; they have real impact on people, positively and negatively.

We’re so overstimulated with imagery and sound today, would you agree? Where do you find silence in all that?

I do. Good songs to close your eyes to, spending time with the people you love; books can be a nice refuge too.

But also, where do you get your inspiration from, music and fashion-wise?

Music-wise, I mostly get inspired from my own life and emotions, or my imagination. I’m a very sensitive person, emotions can be very intense and hard to control at times and music helps me with that. It also helps me give place to certain hardships that happen in my day-to-day life. As for my imagination, ever since I was young I was very much in my head imagining stories. For me, it’s my happy place where I create more for fun and amusement than to understand something. Fashion-wise, anime and cartoons inspire me. And Yseult, a fellow female singer; she has also shown me a lot.

Are there elements of your Portuguese background that you draw from as well? Can you tell us more about that?

From the time growing up in Portugal with my family, I bring a lot of warmth and love with me tied together with a lot of “saudade” of the days that I’d wake up with the sun and dogs barking in the village. “Saudade” is untranslatable in Dutch or English, but it basically means a deep melancholy or missing of something or someone. I think you can hear that in my music.

You’ve mentioned that you would be happy to die a Viking on stage or in the crowd. What do performing and your audience mean to you?

When I perform, it’s a chance to be 100% free and show what I feel and who I am through my music. It’s a chance to connect, because when you connect with an audience, their energy can take your show to a next level. Performing is liberating.