TaniA Kyllikki Turns a Restless Sentence Into HUMAN

In 1758, Carl Linnaeus gave our species a flattering name. Homo sapiens. Wise human. One Latin couplet for every face, every language, every argument that would follow. Taxonomy likes clean borders. Living people do not. Scroll long enough through a comment thread and the second word in that binomial starts to look like an unpaid invoice.

TaniA Kyllikki writes from the other side of that invoice. She is a Berkshire singer and songwriter who built an independent catalogue with her husband, producer and multi-instrumentalist Rynellton, Garry D. Hairston, through their label Awe Inspiring Records. The debut album Why Chapter One arrived in January 2022 and reached Amazon’s Hot 100 Pop Albums chart. Ne-Yo later presented the single Remind Me. The work since then has moved between soul ballad, pop, R&B and electronic colour, often recorded when her body allows it, from a self-made vocal booth fashioned out of a wardrobe beside the bed. Last October she released I Promise I’ll Wait For You. HUMAN was supposed to be one song too many. It is out now, and it leads toward the second album FREE-SPIRITED, due in 2027.

The wardrobe is a useful object here. Furniture designed to close, to keep fabric out of sight, becomes the place where a public sentence is sung. Kyllikki has spoken about watching hostility toward people of different races, cultures and backgrounds gather online. She wrote about it on Facebook. Then the words would not stay on the platform. They started to sound like lyrics. Rynellton was at the keyboard finishing what the pair believed was the last piece for the next album. She told him they had to make one more song, and that it had to be called HUMAN. She wanted gospel heat in the vocal and a harder electronic floor underneath it. He heard the melody. The extra song existed.

That origin matters because the record still carries the temperature of a post that broke its own container. The opening is close and unhurried. Piano and wide keys hold the harmony. Her voice arrives almost confidentially. “Human, that’s what we are / Made up of many races, all different faces / Trying to live out our lives.” There is no coded metaphor to decode. The lyric works like a notice pinned to a village board. Respect. Understanding. No more division. Come together and pray. God help us all. Please make a way. Some writers would sand that language until it looked cooler. Kyllikki leaves the grain visible. Faith sits in the room without being dressed as branding.

The production is where the thought becomes physical. In the verses the rhythm leans contemporary, with tight hats, a syncopated pocket and a low centre that gives the vocal space to stand alone. Then the track starts to climb. Harmonies stack. The arrangement opens. By the chorus the kick stands up in a straight pulse and the stacked voices take on a congregational weight. Rynellton builds the instrumentation around her vocal ideas rather than dropping a finished beat under a later take. You can hear that method. The electronics give the plea a body. The voice keeps the electronics from turning into décor.

Kyllikki’s instrument is the axis. She has a five-octave range and she uses it with control rather than display, moving from a gathered mid register into belts and runs that carry the gospel memory inside the hybrid. The mix and master, finished at AMM Studios in Amsterdam after the pair recorded and pre-mixed at home, keep the vocal forward without flattening the low end. Co-written by Kyllikki and Rynellton, produced by him, vocal-produced by her, with her own lead and backing stacks, HUMAN is a small-room record that wants a large-room feeling. That ambition is the risk. At times the chorus reaches for stadium pathos faster than the lyric has earned new language. The questions repeat until they become a mantra. “What does it mean to be human? / What does it mean for you and for me? / How can we live in harmony?” Repetition can thin a thought. Here it also does the work the title asks for. The song refuses to answer on your behalf.

That refusal is the most interesting thing about it. Unity records often arrive with a finished moral and a raised chin. HUMAN keeps pointing back at the listener. The second verse tightens the same idea around judgment and shame, the invented distances people congratulate themselves for keeping. “Through our existence, there’s no major difference / We created it equally.” Direct again. Almost stubbornly so. The value is not in surprise imagery. It is in the decision to treat empathy as a practice that still needs saying out loud, in a year when saying it out loud can sound naïve. Naivety, used with intention, can be a form of pressure.

There is also a quieter fact sitting under the volume. This is music made outside the usual studio timetable, by an artist who has had to rebuild the conditions of work around illness and recovery, and who has kept the catalogue off Spotify as a stance on how independent artists are treated. None of that automatically improves a chorus. It does explain the grain of the record. HUMAN sounds like a couple trusting an idea that first looked slightly wrong in a bedroom, then following it until the question could stand on its own. Linnaeus wanted a name that would hold. Kyllikki wants a question that will not close. Between those two instincts, the single finds its weight.

The last thing the track does is the first thing the post tried to do. It asks you to look at another face and keep the species name honest.

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HUMAN is out now on Awe Inspiring Records.

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