K'NAAN has been waving his flag across the globe, but the hip-hop star's next stop might be the most surprising. The Somali-born Canadian is headed to Nashville.

"I've been thinking a lot about how country music is the best songwriting in the world now. I think pop is not doing much and hip hop even less. The genuine songwriting is country music. I just want to go and get some inspiration and see what happens out there," the 32-year-old says over the phone from New York.

The Nashville news came after a publicist's interview-coming-to­an- end warning, so a followup question about what country music he was inspired by was cut off (Taylor Swift? Lady Antebellum?

Steve Earle? Jay Farrar?), but no matter what happens it appears K'naan will be living up to his given name, which means traveller.

K'naan was born Keinan Warsame in Mogadishu, Somalia and fled the country with his family when he was 13 at the outbreak of the civil war. After a year in New York, he ended up in Toron­to's Rexdale neighbourhood, home to the city's Somali community. There, with the assistance of hip-hop lyrics, he perfected his English and started writing poetry and rap songs.

His poems posted on Somali websites earned him a place at the 50th anniversary of the UN Commission for Refugees in New York in 2001, where he performed a spoken-word piece criticizing the world's failure to help his home country. He was invited to con­tribute to an album by Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour, who took the young artist on a world tour.

Back in Canada, he hooked up with the production team Track & Field for his critically acclaimed 2005 debut album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, which went on to win a Juno Award for best rap recording and earned him a Polaris Prize nomination.

His 2009 followup, Troubadour, recorded in Jamaica in Bob Marley's former studio and featuring guest artists such as Da­mian Marley, Kirk Hammett and Mos Def, established him as a bona fide force. The album combined hip-hop and pop with African beats and rhythms that became a crossover success and earned him songwriter of the year and artist of the year awards at this year's Junos.

The song Wavin' Flag was chosen by Coca-Cola to be its theme for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and K'naan travelled to 86 countries on the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour.

He's finally home and back touring Canada again. He and his band return to Winnipeg for a show Wednesday at the Burton Cummings Theatre with local hip-hop group the Lytics. Tickets are $19.50 and $35 at Ticketmaster.

"I dreamt of doing that stuff when I was a child, but of course I didn't think about how those dreams would manifest to reality, or any of that. It has always been a dream of mine to see the world," he says. "I was watching a lot of the transformation of the per­sonal to the universal; how that works for art and what it means.

Wavin' Flag's words were being sung by people who don't speak English. I went to China and it was the No. 1 song in the country and people were singing it from there to Mozambique. It's amaz­ing to see that a song can have that kind of effect. Music does really make irrelevant the shackles we put around ourselves, how we segregate. Music does have that impact."

The lyrics to Wavin' Flag are about Somalia and describe an incident that killed three of his friends. For the World Cup, he rewrote the words to make them more celebratory.

While the original sounds uplifting, it features some dark lyrics along with the anthemic melody, a device he uses often. The song Fatima, for example, is a pretty love song, but is about the murder of his childhood girlfriend. ABCs sounds like a party club hit, but describes the harsh realities of growing up in the ghetto.

"It's a little trick of mine; it's a bit of a subconscious thing that hap­pens to me. That's the way I write songs: taking sad scenarios and turning them into a celebratory vibe where you can almost mistake the songs as happy songs because of the melodic sensibilities and the rhythmic ideas I create for the music. I think it's a way to kind of get my stuff out of a funk. It's like, yes, these are the tangible sadnesses of the world, but what do I do with them? I say I want to kind of sing about them in an almost beautiful way. I would make life as a mel­ody you want to sing, even if they are sad lyrics," he says.

Wavin' Flag might have been inspired by war, but it has trans­formed into a hopeful anthem.

Earlier this year, he, producer Bob Ezrin and other Canadian music-industry insiders arranged for a cross-section of artists such as Drake, Nelly Furtado, Justin Bieber, Sam Roberts and Avril Lavigne to meet in Vancouver during the Olympics to perform the song under the Young Artists for Haiti moniker, with all money raised from sales of the single donated to relief organizations work­ing in Haiti, which was devastated by an earthquake on Jan. 12.

So far the single has raised more than $1 million for the im­poverished country and the video has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube. K'naan can't explain why the song has had such an impact, but he's humbled by the experience.

"I just try to tell the stories I know and the lessons I've learned, but never in a preachy sense," he says. "I hate preachy songs."