His voice is bossing SA's dance floors, his novel is making waves, and his new EP, 'The Laughing Son' is out this month. Nakhane Touré is no box-dweller Nakhane Touré talks. A lot. The musician and author's thoughts and sentences bleed quickly into others, which may not be related to the topic at hand. For instance, a question about character development might carry him on a stream of consciousness to high fashion and then candy floss.He's aware of this. At one point in our hour-long interview, he's talking about how much he enjoys his alone time, before pausing and saying: "I don't know why I started talking about this. What's that term, again? Free association. It's used in psychology, where you look at this menu," he says, picking up the menu on our table, "and you think, 'Oh my God, Baroque music in the 17th century'."His own frequent free associations aren't as jarring as that example, so it's not difficult to follow his thought processes. And Touré's abundance of words makes him a great interviewee: he's perfect for print interviews, where time is not an issue, but one imagines he often has to be roped in during live broadcasts.mini_story_image_vleft1And he's in demand since his collaboration with superstar producer and DJ Black Coffee on the hit song We Dance Again, from Coffee's latest album, Pieces of Me.The track has become a dance-floor staple, and has occupied the South African iTunes top five for many weeks. Social media has been abuzz with the We Dance Again challenge, where celebrities and fans (even police officers) post videos of themselves dancing to the song (which has introduced Touré to a whole new audience).Just because he plays a mean guitar and brings up PJ Harvey in conversation doesn't mean he can't throw down on the dance floor, as he's shown during live performances with the DJ.Working with Black Coffee put some things into perspective for Touré. He says it made him realise how just how big a star Black Coffee really is - and how "small" Nakhane is in comparison. So how did the collaboration come about? "He approached me on Twitter," says Touré. Easy as that.Born Nakhane Mavuso in the Eastern Cape in 1988, the musician - whose adopted last name is an ode to the late great Malian blues guitarist Ali Farka Touré - has added a new title: published author.Actually, he says, he was a writer way before he was a musician. He started working on what would become his debut novel, Piggy Boy's Blues, seven years ago, when he was "just a singer singing Robbie Williams songs".The book follows the M family, and particularly Davide M, a young man whose return to the town of his birth ultimately results in disaster and tragedy. Reviews have been good: celebrated author and academic Pumla Dineo Gqola called the book "magic", for instance. But Touré knows that naturally not everyone will enjoy it. Saying something is "for the masses" is "such arrogance", he says. "There's someone out there who's not going to like it."Does he worry about reactions to Piggy Boy's Blues? "I would be lying if I said I didn't - of course I do. I hate it when people are like, 'I don't care' - then why did you put it out there into the world if you don't care? I care but my mind about the work is not changed by how people see it. I know that I'm not making work for everyone. No work should be for everyone. Nothing is that all-encompassing."After Touré signed a deal with Jacana (via its new imprint, BlackBird Books), he left Johannesburg and all its distractions so that he could rewrite the book in peace."I went to my uncle's house in East London because there was not a lot of close family there," he says. "I went there for a week because I thought that the rewrite was going to take a week," he laughs. "I was like, 'It's gonna be a week. Gertrude Stein wrote a novel in a week. Why can't I? Right?' But I'm not Gertrude Stein. I don't take as much opium as she did."Writing, he says, is hard.story_article_right1"We have this weird idea of what it is to write music or make up any kind of art. That you sort of have a drink, you sit down and everything just flows from you," he says. "But it's actually [like] carving a face out of the most impossible granite. I don't know how people did it before but modern life gives us every possible distraction for us not to work. And you have to make the decision to not be distracted."So you're sitting down, you've got a laptop in front of you, thinking 'I'm gonna write'. And then it's, 'Let me check my e-mails'. And then from that e-mail you get a link and it's, 'Oh, just let me read this article. Let me just listen to one song. It will inspire me.' It's not gonna fucking inspire you. Just fucking sit down, switch your phone off, turn off the internet and just write."Rereading the book he'd initially worked on when he was in a different space in his life, Touré found he hated what he was reading. "It was bloated. It was so self-important, self-righteous. I was also a Christian at the time when I first started writing it, so it was this almost me reconciling the life I lived with my beliefs, which had become very problematic for me. I didn't want to make it about that. The novel is still very steeped in the Bible because that's what I was raised on. But now it is more abrogative than it is about actually proving that the Bible is true."Did writing for himself versus writing for a publisher and eventually an audience change his approach to it in any way?"Of course. I already had an audience for my music and I knew that even if 10 or 20 of those people bought the book, I knew that there was a definite audience that was interested in what was said. But I also knew that I didn't want to write a book that was impossible and impenetrable. It doesn't serve anyone except the self-righteous artist. I wanted the book to be quite immediate."Immediacy isn't something most creative types aim for. After all, pretentiousness is often rewarded and praised. Touré has no interest in writing such a book."I want people to enjoy it. Because I knew that on some level the subject matter was heavy. And I hate that word because ..." he trails off. "I find that word cheap. It's like when people say, 'This music is depressing'. When did we choose that certain sounds were depressing? I feel like people have a misunderstanding of what the word 'depression' is. It's a cheapening of depression."How much of Piggy Boy's Blues is personal? This and that. "The setting is personal, the spaces where the book is set are personal," he says. The book is mainly set in Alice, the small town where the writer was born.story_article_left2"But some of the events that happen are fictional. I'm not going to say what those are because then I should have written a memoir. I have written a work of fiction for a reason. Initially I wanted to write something to remedy some pain in me, because of something that happened in my life."During the rewrite he was inspired by short literature. He namechecks Thando Mgqolozana ("short, immediate, humorous, but also serious"), Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau. Referring to the Frenchmen, he says: "I was very interested in that wave of writers who were concentrating on three, four characters instead of this Victorian idea of what a novel is. From a technical point of view I was very interested in a sort of postmodern way of writing. The novel is somewhat fragmented, but it's fragmented in a linear way."Touré released his debut album, Brave Confusion , in 2013. Its dominant subject matter was love, sexuality, religion and belief. It won him several fans and a South African Music Award.But when he listens to it today - something he hardly does - he's not that impressed. "I don't make that kind of music any more. I'm not that person any more. Some of those feelings make me cringe. I don't dishonour that person, I don't dishonour that work. I think it was important for me at that point in time and it was honest. If anything, I think that album was a little bit too honest."He's right: he's not that person any more. I first came across Touré three years ago when he was the opening act for folk musician Yoav. He was shy and hardly looked at the audience. He sang very softly and seemed to be singing more for himself than for the crowd. Fast-forward to a few months ago, he was performing at Constitution Hill and had little in common with the mousy young man I'd seen years before. To say he was confident is an understatement: he owned the crowd without even trying. He was magical.The softness of then is only evident in his voice when he speaks. When I bring this up I also mention how jarring that is, considering the levels his falsetto can hit not only on record but live, too. His voice is almost bigger than he is."I've always been very touchy about straining my voice," he says. "I've always been afraid of losing my voice and losing its quality. The voice is an instrument. It's part of your body. The way you treat your body is how it's gonna respond as well. So if you're not exercising, if you're not being good to yourself, then your voice is gonna reflect that. So these are things that I always think about. But I'm also not gonna fucking stop myself from living, because that's ridiculous." Just because he's now an author doesn't mean Touré has stopped working on music. His EP The Laughing Son will be released later this month. He co-produced it with Matthew Fink (who has worked with Laurie Levine, The Black Hotels and Tailor). The EP's black-and-white cover shows Touré on a chair, his body twisted like a contortionist's, muscles defined. He wears the most spectacular pair of black shoes known to man. It reminds me of Joy Division's Closer cover.Unlike with Brave Confusion, there is no acoustic guitar on The Laughing Son. Touré decided to teach himself artistic restraint and fight his natural impulse to add more to a track."What I've been very influenced by lately is minimalism - and I guess this is an oxymoron - but a lavish minimalism. I'm very interested in getting these three colours and working with these three colours. I'm interested in getting the entire spectrum, mixing it all together and just getting brown. I've been exploring how to work with shade and light."The most complex of artists did their best work when they decided to tone it down. Miles Davis's In a Silent Way is one of my favourite albums and it's one of his most simple, and in my opinion his best."One of the most refreshing things about chatting with Touré is not only how open he is (he's not interested in keeping his art and its process mysterious), but how un-precious he is about what happens to it once it's left his hands.He says: "It's like that terrible analogy that says your work is like a child: you teach it to ... crawl, to walk. But the moment that it's out of the house it's not yours any more. The child can fuck whoever it wants to fuck, it can take whatever drugs it wants to take, it can be as good or as bad as it wants to be. You cannot control how people see that child. You've done all you can to prepare it for the world, and that's all you can do."I've done all I can for this work to be as good as I can make it at this point in my life, in 2015, as 27-year-old Nakhane. I'm sure in 10 years' time if I'm still alive I'll look back and think, 'Oh God, oh no'," he chuckles. "Hopefully I'll get better. Or like some people, this might be the best work I've ever made."'Piggy Boy's Blues' is out now. 'The Laughing Son' will be out on iTunes this month. Touré launches the EP on November 27 2015 at the Bassline in Joburg...