Sananda Maitreya had a simple plan for his 13th album: 13 songs, led by guitar, bass and drums. The ominous number didn’t faze him: “Anything that others are irrationally afraid of interests me,” he said recently. “I love black cats. Black cats are bad? No, black cats are fucking cool. The number 13 needs love, too.”
But the project prompted an unprecedented outpouring of love, which started just prior to his 60th birthday and blossomed into the 41-track epic The Pegasus Project: Pegasus and the Swan. Divided into two sides – the first guitar-led, the second more classical – it’s the third part of the “seasons” concept begun by 2017’s Prometheus & Pandora and 2021’s Pandora’s PlayHouse.
Call it the Sananda Maitreya Cinematic Universe: “Every record has to stand on its own,” he has said. “But if you want to go deeper, there’s a world that’s interconnected, with interchangeable stories and characters. It’s like how Marvel and DC make films such as Iron Man and Spider-Man with the same understanding of mythology as the Ancient Greeks.”
It’s part of a renewed season of activity for Maitreya: in 2022, he reissued his debut album under the name he took in 1995, Introducing the Hardline According to Sananda Maitreya (previously he was Terence Trent D’Arby), which he has called an emotional experience – but also one that happily reunited him with the album’s original producer, Martyn Ware of Heaven 17.
In 2022, he collaborated with Calvin Harris on the latter’s Love Regenerator project. And this summer, Maitreya will perform his first UK show in more than 20 years when he appears at the Love Supreme jazz festival alongside the likes of Chaka Khan and Dionne Warwick.
You can ask him about that – or life in Milan, being patronised by the likes of Miles Davis and Mick Jagger, training as a boxer or indeed anything else – when Maitreya sits for the Guardian reader interview. Post your questions in the comments by 2 April and we’ll put the best ones to him in a future issue of Film and Music.
