Photos by Rhiannon Adam

When Nakhane released his album You Will Not Die last year, it introduced the world to the kind of artist who comes along once or twice a decade. With a giant, emotionally attuned voice, Nakhanes music is both atmospheric and intimate at the same time, as if he is singing directly to you in a huge cathedral.

We tend to typecast such rare artists quickly. Media outlets rush to make the person sound as if they just walked through a star gate into our world. If you are an even rarer queer artist who has made it into the public consciousness like Nakhane, articles will describe you as mysterious, fragile or feline, as he has been called.

This is unfortunate because it makes the 31-year-old South African singer, actor and author sound humorless and dour, which he is not. On the phone, he is actually quite funny and cheerful, with an easy laugh. My formative years have so many twists and turns. Its kind of fun to read the articles. But its OK, they get the overall idea right, he says with a laugh.

Nakhanes backstory is a compelling one: He was born in Alice (a small town in Eastern Cape, South Africa) to a large, conservative, religious family, and left his biological mother at the age of 8 to live with an aunt in Port Elizabeth, taking her surname, Tour. (When asked, Nakhane says he is not ready to talk about why he had to leave his mother, other than to say there were problems.)