Michael Kiwanuka Makes the Simple Profound on ‘Small Changes’

“A song can make you hear or understand things that you don’t know how to say,” the English singer and songwriter Michael Kiwanuka said. “I think of songs as ways to communicate without conversation.”

For more than a decade, Kiwanuka, 37, has been creating songs that speak directly and soulfully. Most often, he uses just a handful of chords and succinct, open-ended lyrics. But his words often turn into incantations over lush, organic grooves that reach back to vintage R&B, psychedelia and trip-hop. The songs offer questions and life lessons, mingling the personal and the political, balancing sorrow and solace.

“Music heals me,” Kiwanuka said in a video interview from his home in England. “So that’s what I try and do.”

Kiwanuka’s fourth studio album, “Small Changes,” is due in November, while in September and October he will be touring North America as a co-headliner with Brittany Howard, including an Oct. 2 stop at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y.

“I’m amazed by his songwriting; I think it’s classic,” Howard said from her home in Nashville. “There’s an art form to being vulnerable and telling your story, but also keeping it simple so that other people can relate to it,” she added. “The mood he’s creating, the stories he’s telling — it feels like I’m being let in on a little secret or something, like a close friend of mine is telling me their life.”

Kiwanuka, whose parents are from Uganda, was born and grew up in London, often feeling like an outsider. “Maybe it’s an immigrant thing — you’re always trying to discover yourself,” he said.