Miguel: "Soul Is the Voice We’re Born With"

The singer/songwriter joins Rainn to talk identity, creativity, and a world cracking open

Greetings to all you Soulful Boomlets!

This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn is joined by the extraordinary Miguel.

Miguel is a genre-bending, spiritually curious, world-building artist whose music fuses sensuality, vulnerability, and social insight into a singular, visionary voice. If you’re an R&B lover, a millennial—or just someone drawn to genre-bending music with emotional and spiritual depth—there’s a good chance you’ve heard his music.

Miguel’s work has always lived at the crossroads of the sensual and the sacred, the personal and the cosmic. Whether he’s bending genre, blending identities, or building sonic worlds that feel both futuristic and ancestral, he’s asking the same questions Soul Boom asks: Who are we beneath the roles? What does it mean to be fully human? And how do we stay spiritually awake in a world that tries to put us in boxes?

Image by Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartMedia

One of the most striking moments in our discussion comes when Miguel talks about being seen as “racially ambiguous” early in his career. This wasn’t framed as a celebration of complexity or a widening of possibility. It was framed as a problem. The industry didn’t know how to categorize him, didn’t know what demographic box to check, didn’t know where to place him on a shelf or a chart. And because of that, they didn’t know how to “sell” him.

It’s a strangely modern spiritual dilemma: What happens when the world doesn’t know where to put you?

And Miguel’s answer — spoken through years of growth, misfires, breakthroughs, and a fierce loyalty to the truth of who he is:

You outgrow the box. You don’t shrink to fit it.

This is the heartbeat of a spiritual revolution. Because categories will always lag behind consciousness. Systems will always be slower than souls.

Miguel’s journey is a reminder that:

• Our lives narrow when we let others name us.

• Our art shrinks when we contort ourselves to fit the marketplace.

• Our spirits dim when we accept identities that are too small for the magnitude of who we can be.

Josh Brasted/Getty

He wasn’t “ambiguous.” He was emergent. And emergent identities always confuse the old system.

We are far more than the labels society gives us — racial, political, economic, aesthetic, or otherwise. We are souls, luminous and messy, carrying mysteries no checkbox can contain.

He wrote his own story. He claimed his own sound. He stopped waiting for the world to understand him and began creating from the truth of who he already was.

In that sense, Miguel isn’t just an artist. He’s a case study in spiritual self-authorship — the courage to step outside the frames that never fit and live from the inside out. Miguel’s mixed heritage wasn’t a marketing liability—it’s in fact one of his superpowers. He draws on his complex life experiences to synthesize many thoughts and styles of music.

And it is perhaps what gives him a broader perspective. In one particular song, Candles In the Sun, his world-embracing vision comes through. It’s a song whose lyrics are ripe for a little Soul Boomy arm chair analysis.

Miguel opens with the most Soul Boomy of questions:
“Is there a God? Is He watching? Is She watching? Are they watching now?”

This is not the gentle church-lady version of the question. This is the “I just turned on the news and saw five things that shouldn’t exist in a functioning society” version. It’s the cosmic equivalent of, “Hello?? Manager??”

But Miguel doesn’t stay in philosophy class long, because right away he pivots into, “If not, what are we doing? Where are we going?” which is basically the question every American asks five minutes into doomscrolling. You can practically hear him sighing between the syllables. He sounds less like a man searching for God and more like a man searching for a functioning adult in the room.

Then he looks around and sees us — the people — wandering through our existential crisis: ”Look at all these people, searching for a reason, searching for a peace of mind.”

Miguel performs on Day 3 of Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival at Golden Gate Park on Aug. 7, 2016 in San Francisco. Steve Jennings/WireImage.

And isn’t that the whole vibe right now? Everyone trying to fill the God-shaped hole with supplements, scented candles, hot takes, and side hustles. Everyone doing “gratitude” journaling like it’s going to stop the sea levels from rising. Everyone trying to get their brain chemistry to stop acting like a drunken raccoon.

But here’s the thing: Miguel doesn’t just diagnose the emotional crisis. He immediately pinpoints our values crisis: “We’re all created equal — that’s what they teach us. But that ain’t how we treat each other.”

That right there could be the national anthem. Just that one line, on loop, while fireworks explode over a stadium built on top of several unresolved contradictions.

And then — then — the verse hits. He unloads a list of societal disasters with the efficiency of someone rattling off items on a grocery list he hates:
“Diamond in the bag, babies on crack, kick in the door, wavin’ the 4-4…”
The whole thing reads like if CNN, the Congressional Budget Office, and that one dude who’s “seen some things” all co-wrote a poem.

Miguel gets political — not with policy jargon, not with think tank vocabulary, but with a simple exhausted truth: “Business and governments just watch as the innocent fade. Mindless bureaucracy fail, hindering government aid.”

Mindless bureaucracy. Fail. Yes, Miguel. Welcome. This is America. You’re describing the national sport.

“Aren’t you appalled?” he asks. Yes Miguel, we are.

And then the question returns — “What are we doing? Where are we going?” — and at this point it feels less like a lyric and more like America’s GPS desperately trying to reroute: “Make a U-turn. Make a U-turn. Make a—actually you know what? Good luck.”

But then comes the part of the song that honestly maybe we should carve into stone somewhere:
“Look around — we’re all that we got.”

This is the inconvenient truth nobody wants tattooed on their moral forehead. Because it means there’s no cavalry coming. No billionaire savior. No perfect candidate. No algorithm that magically stops making things worse. It’s just us, the humans, trying to build a world while also remembering to hydrate and not say something stupid at brunch.

And then Miguel goes tender — almost prayerful:
“May we all live long, may we all be brave,
And the bridges we burn only light our way.”

That is not Hallmark optimism. That is the kind of blessing people give at the beginning of revolutions or the end of civilizations. A hope that whatever collapses behind us becomes illumination rather than rubble.

He returns to his first question — “Is there a God?” — but now with a slightly different tone: “I’m sure He’s watching.”

And where will we find that God? Perhaps in the last place we’re looking. Miguel croons once again, one last time:

“Take a look around now — we’re all that we got.”

This song ends not with despair, but with an open door: if we are all that we’ve got, then maybe — finally — it’s time to act like it.

Well, Boombinos, if it’s true that (as Miguel sings) “we’re all that we got,” then how are you watching out for one another? What does that look like in your life this week?