During the spring and summer of 2023, Michael Kiwanuka decamped to a small, remote recording studio near his home in Southampton, England. The celebrated singer-songwriter, who’d won the prestigious Mercury Prize for 2019’s Kiwanuka, was about halfway done with his follow-up, 2024’s Small Changes, but was already starting to conceptualize the album that would come after that.
In a short documentary filmed at that time — and premiering today exclusively on Rolling Stone — Kiwanuka talks about this gestating project in terms of the fun, mindless doodles he’d draw at university, or while chatting with someone.
“This album,” he says, “I wanted it to be like a really detailed version of those sketches you do in the journal.” Kiwanuka wanted the music to be precise and well-formed, but still emanating that playful, stream-of-consciousness feeling. It led him to a perfect title for the album: Fudge.
“Fudge has got, like this playfulness to it,” he says. “It’s not something serious, like, ‘’Do you want to eat caviar?’ I don’t know about that, but you’ll never turn down fudge.”
Fudge, Kiwanuka’s fifth album, was released last week, Oct. 23, about a year after it was originally supposed to arrive. The reason for the delay wasn’t explained at the time, but it did coincide somewhat with news that a “continued illness” had forced Kiwanuka to drop out of a festival in Ireland last July. After that, Kiwanuka largely disappeared from public life. Only recently did the musician reveal that he’d suffered a stroke.
As he continues his recovery, Kiwanuka has, understandably, not done much press in support of Fudge. That makes this new doc, The Making of ‘FUDGE’: A Film, a unique window into its creation. Directed by Kiwanuka’s friend and videographer/photographer, Jodie Canwell, it pairs intimate behind-the-scenes footage of the musician and his friends working and hanging out together, as well as interviews with Kiwanuka, in which he discusses the album as it’s coming together, along with his ever-evolving creative practice and philosophy.
“It was a privilege to be given the freedom to document Mike and the whole creative process,” Canwell said in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. “And it was magic, just like any time I spend with Mike, to see it all happen.”
