“How are our brains so cool?!” Singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Day Wilson and I are discussing synaesthesia, the neurological and perceptual phenomenon that inhabits the brain, as if a sixth sense, in a variety of ways, revolving around colour and the senses. It’s something that many of the most creative people have, musicians especially. “I know some people have perfect pitch though colours. It’s insane to me that people can hear a note and hear yellow.” Day Wilson herself has recently discovered an entanglement with the curious attribute, which in turn led to the naming of her sophomore album, Cyan Blue, which has been released today (Friday 3rd May).

We are sitting outside a cafe in Maida Vale, down the road from the infamous BBC Studios at which she will be recording a live session after our coffee. It’s a bustling, gusty Tuesday lunchtime and our surroundings are busy and somewhat abrasive, but the 31-year-old, dressed head-to-toe in black, rarely allows her mind to wander outside of the bubble of our conversation. “I just go with the flow,” she shrugs, discussing her schedule in these few days frequenting London, unbeknownst to the details bar a short stop-off to Paris the following afternoon. She’s in Europe largely for press duties, and will be returning to Toronto at the end of the week, a place that she was born and raised, and has called home for the vast majority of her life.

“I think I’m really lucky to be from there,” she says of her home city. “When you grow up somewhere and it’s all you know, you’re like, ‘Well this is just what it is.’ But having the privilege of travelling and seeing other places, I can now understand why Toronto is great.” Growing up in a quiet neighbourhood with musically-inclined parents, Day Wilson was, from a young age, gifted a foundation on which to build her own vibrant artistic growth. “I know it’s a cliche answer, but it kind of chose me,” she offers on her pathway to becoming a musician, shaped by a childhood that influences “every fibre” of her to this day. “I don’t think it was me choosing it consciously. I realised at a certain point that I really gravitated towards instruments, singing and listening to music. So it was an easy progression.”

She’s grateful for her parents’ taste in music; motown, a genre which Day Wilson splashes hues of into her own sound, would often ring around her family home, as well as The Beatles, whose “great two-part harmonies” she pinpoints as an educative gateway into vocal texturing and finding pitch. It was the piano that first struck up a fascination with music, and is to this day “the instrument that [she] can enter the flow state the most with.” She labels production as something that she is continuously infatuated with, but dispels singing as “always kind of an afterthought.”

Anyone versed in Day Wilson’s music may be shocked at such an admission given the fact that, for many, it is her powerful yet tender, wholly unique vocals that drew them into her soul-laden sonic world. “I would never self-proclaim to say I have a crazy voice,” disagreeing with me after saying such. “But I will say I didn’t just start out with a good voice. I have a lot of recordings of me, even when I was like 19 or 20, trying to sing and I couldn’t really. I always had a good ear, but I didn’t have a tone of voice and I couldn’t do a lot of things with my voice. So straight up, it just took practising; singing a lot and studying other singers, mimicking them and finding my own voice within that.”

Day Wilson found success in 2016 with the release of her stunning debut EP “CDW”, and its assured follow up “Stone Woman” two years later, before unveiling her stellar debut album, ALPHA, in 2021, which was amongst the most emotionally potent and musically meticulous records that year. During this time, the music scene in Toronto began to mould itself as one of the most impactful and bountiful in the global sphere, especially within the rough R&B/neo-soul parameters that Day Wilson herself nestles amongst. “I’ve definitely been lucky to be part of a community of great artists in Toronto,” she says of the city’s myriad of talent that includes BADBADNOTGOOD, Daniel Caesar, Roy Woods and 6lack. “I can’t really imagine what it would be like coming into the global music industry and music scene without having that core community. I feel really lucky to have peers whose music I really admire and respect. It’s good to have people around you who are making great art; it pushes you to make great art as well.

Although regularly working with the likes of revered jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD (whom she calls “solid humans”), Day Wilson has always been selective when it comes to creating alongside others. “If a collaboration is meant to come about, it’ll come about naturally. It’s not going to come from industry people being like, ‘You guys should do a session together’. That can actually be really productive for some artists but for me personally, my comfort is the most important thing.”

This comfort lies at the root of her ability to write songs that are open and vulnerable. Laying her cards on the table isn’t something the polymath is afraid to do, unrestricted by fact or fable, rather drawing a parallel between the two entities to evoke a deep-seated emotional response. “I leave room for interpretation,” she smiles. “People might interpret the lyrics in a different way than they’re intended to be or in a different way than I wrote them. People might think they know certain things and they really don’t, you know? My private life is actually still super fucking private. The things that I write about a lot of the time are from my distant past and they’re not always relevant to what’s going on in my life right now. In storytelling, there are no rules. Squinting at reality is a really great way to find beauty in the mundane.”

Day Wilson has always been a feeler; not the type of person to brush emotion under the carpet to find it months later covered in avoidances’ dust. Her depth is something she celebrates, not dispels, a prideful attribute of her character. “We all have different strong suits,” she says. “My strong suit is being emotional. I learned that it’s not a weakness; to feel things heavily. I think when I was younger, I worried that I felt things too much and that it got in my way, and that whatever I was going through would weigh on me in a really intense way. But as time has gone on, I’ve realised that it’s a real strength for me, especially as a songwriter. I don’t breeze through heartache, I don’t breeze through the challenges that I’ve experienced in my life. I take time to work through them and process them. And my most effective processing tool is making music and writing.” It is through her success in music that Day Wilson has been allowed her the time and resources to fully explore herself; a privilege she recognises, revels in and celebrates. “Trust me, the fact that I get to wake up in the morning and play piano for as long as I want and as long as I need to; that is not lost on me. That is fucking beautiful and really rare.”

Today’s release of Day Wilson’s sophomore album Cyan Blue is a breath of well-needed fresh air in the R&B space. The record is honest, textured, warm and characterful, the work of an artist who knows her sonic terrain so well that she can step outside of it and still sound amidst it. It’s a truly gorgeous listen, start to finish, without overt spectacle or hit-chasing hooks, instead a focus on the core of its writer’s persona and musicality. Whether on the dreamy mid track-list gem “Do U Still”, the quiet devastation of previously released single “Canopy” or the sublime cover of Judy Garland’s 1939 classic “Over The Rainbow”, Day Wilson sounds vital and revitalised, measured but raw in her lyrical ideas, and effortless but piercing in her flawless vocals.

The LP’s direction was driven by instinct; Day Wilson’s aforementioned newly found synaesthesia, in a sense, commands the tone, timbre and palette, as well as of course the album’s title. “I didn’t think that I had experienced synaesthesia before, but when I was working on the album, I realised that I did have it,” she reveals. “I thought in the past that I didn’t have it because everything, when it came to making my own music, was orange and yellow and ombre. Then when I was working on this project everything was blue-green. I don’t know how to describe it because it’s not really something I can put into words, but, if it didn’t feel blue-green and it didn’t give me the blue-green vision, then I didn’t do it. Everything was geared towards that, and so I thought I wanted to build that into the album title because not everyone pictures something when they listen to music, so adding the visual aspect was a cool way to give people the lens I had when making it. In coming up with the title, I started to find a lot of connections and metaphors that were tying the project together.”

Through the creation of Cyan Blue, Day Wilson learned to let go. A self-confessed perfectionist – in her career, at least – it was through working closely with a co-producer and trusting her own decisions that allowed her to envision and write the album. You can hear the artist embrace her liberty – mostly from herself – across the album’s 13 rich and cascading cuts. “I’ve learned to not question what my instinct is,” she contemplates. “Trusting gut reactions, and trusting first thoughts when it comes to lyrics. And trusting my influences too, knowing that music is the one thing that I’m sure of in this life, you know? I’m not sure of my taste in most other things in life, but I know that I can rely on this. I’m at this point now where I allow myself to just trust my instinct, and I’m really grateful for that growth in myself. It doesn’t even matter how well the music does or where it goes, that inner journey of knowing that I’m self-assured with my vision and the execution of that vision feels really good for myself.”

With her new second record set to cement her as one of contemporary R&B’s most significant visionaries, Day Wilson’s stock will invariably continue to rise – not too much though, she hopes. “I want to be able to make a living off of music and that’s what I’m doing right now so I feel like I’ve succeeded,” she answers when I enquire how she feels about the concept of fame. “If I can continue to succeed in this way for as long as possible then I’m a success. But I don’t aspire to have a level of fame that creates obstacles in day- to-day life.”

Charlotte Day Wilson’s gaze is fixed upon musical excellence, personal growth and, most of all -like the rest of us if we really think about it – she just wants to be loved. “I want to make timeless music,” she says before scurrying off to perform at the esteemed BBC Maida Vale studios. “Not in the sense that it sounds old, but that it can stand the test of time. I want to love well, and I want to be loved well. I think love is the meaning of life, let’s be honest.” Hard to disagree with that, don’t you think?