For Tribute Birdie Mboweni, anthropologist, singer and songwriter, all she is is not separate, it merges and needs one another for her to be whole.
You would think our conversation would be about her upcoming song Mananga that will be released on Friday, 18 September, from her forthcoming album Matimu, a Xitsonga word meaning "history" dropping later in the month.
But I quickly realised the importance of her work as a musician, her work as an academic and the intersection in which both worlds meet each other.
Matimu takes shape from years of studying the environment and people, particularly the history of black people and their relationship with protected areas in South Africa.
"I always like to say there is nothing new about us being here. We are only coming back to where we belong. Usually when the story of people interacting with protected areas is told, it's as if black people don't like being in nature or black people don't enjoy taking care of the environment.
"Whereas we lived in these places before our communities were brutally and violently removed from these areas, only for them to be fenced off for the creation of these protected areas or national parks," she says.
That thinking runs through Mananga.
Ahile Mananga la, lomu hile kaya la means that this land is not the wilderness but it is home. This is the chorus of Mananga. A song that speaks about the land not just being empty but that it carries generations of memory.
There is a song on the album, titled Hi Wena Mani, that says our ancestors are resting peacefully. For Mboweni, this signifies that they are back to the places where we've been told we don't belong.
A thread visible in her body of work is that we recognise who we are, where we come from and what we have inherited and use the correct language to tell this part of our history.
Her relationship with the environment and people came way before she had the vocabulary to articulate it.
As a child, she grew up close to the Kruger National Park. The park had programmes that were accessible to her.
She attended symposiums and on some visits would camp alongside rangers, learning about birds, trees and plants in the surrounding areas.
This experience left such an impression on her that she would go on to study ecotourism and later pursue postgraduate studies.
Her research examined everyday relationships between communities and the Vaal River. She returned to protected areas, studying human-environment interactions in Mapungubwe and what those relationships revealed about post-apartheid South Africa.
Her research eventually found its way into her music.
Mboweni shares that she had told a friend, whom she studies with at the University of Queensland, that Matimu was the output of her thesis.
The album transforms research, conversations, memory and oral histories into something intimate and accessible.
"The music that I write on Matimu comes from my experiences throughout the time I was doing my research."
Mboweni says she was careful in how some of the music was curated. As much as there are questions about our history, she did not intend to make the music only about that theme.
"I speak about the post apartheid protest. We've had a lot of protests, not only in South Africa but on the continent, even in the world really. And this is me saying: 'As much as we are going to reflect on the history and remind ourselves of who we are, there are also these things that are going on now in post-apartheid South Africa.'"
She says that there are current politics that we can't ignore.
Communities are also dissatisfied. Amid this, people still want to stamp their footprints in the timelines of history. The music calls for that.
Language is the overarching theme of the album. It is sung in Xitsonga, with one song in Tshiveda. This choice is deliberate, says Mboweni. She says that often, when stories are translated in a language outside the communities in which they come from, they get lost.
"I needed to tell these stories in my home language. When we use our language to tell our own stories, we have the privilege of telling them the way that we want without being misinterpreted."
Her insistence on indigenous languages is therefore not simply a stylistic decision. It is part of the album's politics of knowledge.
There is a lot of conversation about reclaiming indigenous knowledge, but sometimes the knowledge is extracted from communities without properly acknowledging where it comes from.
Mboweni's response is central to her work in acknowledging where the knowledge comes from.
"My work really is centred on sharing indigenous knowledge and centering that knowledge but essentially acknowledging where it comes from and who has shared it with me.
"Because those people are very important to me and their knowledge is very important to me. It wouldn't make sense otherwise for me to share this knowledge without centering them because these stories come from them," she says.
This matters because in a country and continent where knowledge is often extracted and repackaged into something different, it erases an entire history of people.
The album moves between ancestors and contemporary protest, between mountains and political movements, between indigenous languages and the borders drawn across the landscape.
Even its understanding of nature is deliberately unsettled.
Mboweni references the writer and cultural theorist Raymond Williams's observation that the concept of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history. It is an idea that seems to provide a conceptual spine for Matimu.
"Nature does not exist on its own," she says. "We are nature ourselves."
It is an album about stories but also about who gets to tell them, in which language, from whose perspective and with what responsibility.
Mananga, arriving on Friday, offers the first entry point into that world before Matimu is released on 24 September.