About an hour after performing at the Corona Sunsets Festival, Msaki casually jogs onto the tennis court next to the clubhouse behind the stage.
Dressed in the same white dress shirt and white shorts she wore onstage during her energetic performance, the 34 year old glides gracefully around the court as she hits the ball back and forth with a friend.
Those of us seated at the clubhouse watch smilingly, enamoured by Msaki’s normalcy.
But it’s hardly surprising to see her like this — she has been South Africa’s supreme woman and girl-next-door since she first burst onto the scene with her feature on Prince Kaybee’s runaway 2019 hit single, "Fetch Your Life".
And the setting could hardly be any more spectacular. This, the first leg of the festival’s world tour, is being held in Clifton, Cape Town, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the majestic Table Mountain range, which is the most visited national park in South Africa.
When we speak inside the clubhouse, I ask her if she enjoyed the performance and, generally, how she gauges whether she’s done a good job onstage.
“I never know if I’ve done a good job, I can only do my best with whatever I’m dealing with,” she sayd. “I mean, the audience will never know what we’re dealing with in the back end, what I could and couldn’t hear. I’ve learned to divorce having a good performance to my experience.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Ah I had a crap time’ and people are like, ‘What an amazing time we had’, so I always try check what the experience of the performance was before I give it a judgement because we’re hard on ourselves – we always struggle, we always don’t hear what we wanna hear, we always have technical things to go through.
“So that’s not the gauge for me anymore, how it felt for me on the stage is not the benchmark as much.”
Msaki seems to be alluding to having had some technical difficulties during her performance. However, from my vantage point at least, she sounded as angelic and dynamic as she does when you listen to her on headphones.
“It was cool to play some songs with my friends,” she adds. “It was amazing to sing songs where people were willing to sing back and have a bit of time to play with vocals.
“Overall I’d say it was good for me and everything else is not that important.”
One of those friends is Sun-El Musician, who took over the decks from her DJ halfway into her performance.
He has been a cornerstone in Msaki’s continued rise and rise over the past few years.
Their first and most notable collaboration came in 2020 with “Ubomi Abumanga”, the multi-platinum-selling hit single “which has been one of the biggest dance songs out of SA over the past few years”.
“A year later, Msaki once again teamed up with Musician on a single titled "Bestfriend", which was one of the most well-received songs during her performance.
Off the back of this momentum, Msaki went on to release her sophomore album, "Platinumb Heart Open" that same year.
The album’s critical and commercial acclaim saw Msaki earn the coveted crown of Best Female at the 2022 South African Music Awards (Samas).
In between these releases, she’s been prominent on some amapiano features, most notably last year’s Kabza De Small hit "Khusela", and shown herself to be adept across the multitude of other genres she’s dabbled in.
Given her versatility, Msaki isn’t quite sure what her preference is genre-wise.
“I think maybe if I can assess my preference by the thing I do most, because I love so many different things, so the thing I do the most is just sit on a piano and write a song, sit with a guitar and write a song.
“That’s the most consistent way that I share. That’s kind of what I love and that always forms the soul of whatever song in whatever genre.
“That’s the core thing that I think takes me to different places. That’s more of a discipline issue, I write every single day.”
A week prior to her performance at Corona Sunsets, Msaki featured on fast-rising South African dance DJ Karyendasoul’s new single, "Jacaranda".
Despite the song’s newness, it’s already showing all the hallmarks of yet another hit in her catalogue and, during her performance, scores of fans were singing it word for word.
She explains, “That song is picking up really quickly and I’m really happy for Karyenda because I wanted to just give him an anchor point for his album, and we’re from the same village in the Eastern Cape.
“There’s this little store there called Jacaranda. We just spent a bit of time in Durban – I was there for a week, I was there for other shows and I just made a pocket of time for him cause I think he’s just an interesting young producer who’s got a great voice and I wanted to just, in whatever way, support his project moving forward.
“So the song was easy to make because I really wanted to contribute something special to his project but I still didn’t expect for people to take it on so quickly.”
Msaki points to her pop sensibilities as one of the main drawcards to the song’s success.
“I’m also a pop writer, I know how to write simple stuff that people will be able to sing along with,” she says.
“My dad is also a person that’s always said, ‘If the kids can’t sing along with it, I don’t know if you have a song’. The first time that he called me and said congratulations was when I’d written ‘Ubomi Abamanga’.
“He was like, ‘Hey, I heard some kids singing along to this on the way to the shop, I think you’ve got a song’.
“So it’s also about simplicity and I think that’s maybe why people are connected to it and I think the story that every little village has got that little corner store, that little shop. Maybe there’s something there.”
In February, Msaki released her first ever collaborative album, "Synthetic Hearts", alongside Tubatsi Mpho Moloi.
French cellist Clément Petit, whom the two originally encountered when Msaki and Petit guested on Moloi’s group, Urban Village’s, 2021 debut “Udondolo”, also features heavily here.
Msaki says she has a few more collaborative albums in the pipeline.
“That was the last one I did, and it’s the first one to come out. That one was the most under laboured, least overthought, and that’s why it came out so quickly because we didn’t overthink it.
“It had a few elements: two voices, a cello, a bit of guitar, some very minimalistic modern percussion and it was not a premeditated project – we didn’t say we’re writing about this or we’re writing about love.
“That was just the body and the story that the songs told together once we assessed them.
“But it was just the result of one week in a residency knowing that I wanted to make music with these three people and this is the result.”