Fireboy DML hosted a Space on X on Monday night to take questions about ZUKO!, and when the talk turned to “Dear Father,” the prayer that opens the album, he told the 1.3K people who had joined that he had recorded it sick, and that a few days later he was in surgery for a sinus infection, sure his voice was gone.
“I genuinely thought I was going to lose my voice,” he said. He told them it’s there on the record: “If you listen attentively, you could hear the strain, there’s a strain.” He had planned to go back and sing it again, then left it as it was. The weeks after the operation were the hard part. “The three weeks after that was crazy because I was just bleeding from my nose,” he said. “I would wake up, blood all over the bed.” He said that time is why the song means so much more to him now, and he called it his favorite.
He had told The NATIVE before release that the song was him “telling God your greatest fears before you go on and get active,” and after Monday that line is hard to hear as a figure of speech.
“Dear father, hear me now / Answer my call,” he sings, and then, “It is a long way down / I don’t wanna fall.” Those few lines come round again and again, with the ambient composer Judah Earl credited beside him, and “I know there is no easy way out / And nothing is sure” sits in the middle of them. Fireboy described the opener to The NATIVE as a way “to calm your mind,” a calm before the storm, and said the second song, “BY FIRE!,” is the one that really sets the tone. Twelve songs later the album ends on “FIGHTING,” where he sings “I’m still fighting for my life / I’m still a soldier” and, a few lines on, “I’m still saying I’ll be fine / But I don’t know now.” He posted that first line on X, with a clip of the song, the morning after ZUKO! came out.
The guest list came up on the Space too. ZUKO! has five guests across four of its 13 tracks, and Fireboy said he had made some of the solo ones with particular artists in mind and tried to get them on. “It just didn’t work out, I swear to God,” he said. “I just stopped forcing it.” He admitted he was “very upset” about it at first, before deciding the album was meant to sound this way. “C’est la vie,” he said. “That’s life.” It’s also the title of track five.
As for the voice, it came through. “Now it’s all good,” he told the Space. “I’m alive.”