How afropop has influenced pop culture language
From 2face's "nothing dey happen" to Olamide's "sneh" and Davido's "E Choke"
While making one of his exuberant home videos that make a fleeting presence on the Internet via Instagram stories in December 2020, Davido seems angry. Staring into the camera, the singer is shouting a word over and over. “Tule! Tule jare!” No one watching is quite sure what is happening in real-time, but very soon the singer breaks into a full-throated laugh and it is clear that he’s just having some fun with his audience. Less than an hour later, the video had gone viral on Twitter, and a few hours later, Davido announced a challenge to reward the best rendition of “Tule” by any Internet denizen, giving birth to a new slang in Afropop’s rapidly-expanding canon.
TULE JARE
pic.twitter.com/mnhMlMihYv
— Davido (@davido) December 28, 2020
As tempting as it is to question the etymology of Tule, there’s no questioning the slang’s reach and efficacy. In fact, this has always been the case with afropop slangs. From Wizkid’s “Wad Up” to Davido’s “E Choke”, the history of popular Nigerian music is very much a panoramic examination of the wonders of language; how slangs pass diverse cultural pipelines, receiving slight tweaks along the way until they become an unavoidable part of the cultural language and become markers of our specific moments in history.
From Mad Melon owning the Danfo Drivers tag – a slang used to refer to drivers of Lagos’ instantly recognisable yellow and black buses – to Zule Zoo using “kerewa” to disguise the sexual suggestiveness of their smash hit of the same name, and DaGrin subverting the intended meaning of kondo on his song of the same name, Afropop has had a unique relationship with slangs as living archives of our lived experiences, and a provider of terms to viscerally convey previously unexpressed thoughts and ideas in resonant monosyllabic or disyllabic capsules.
Most of the rise of afropop to global popularity has been explained through its iconic drums and searing rhythmicity that has won it a ton of fans across the world, however, as with most works of art, it’s the culture that provides a wider narrative for what the music sounds like and morphs into. While music is largely cathartic, it’s also a scene-setting, engendering cultural mood board into the popular zeitgeist. On “No Shaking”, off his sophomore album, Grass To Grace, 2Baba weaved a narrative of self-dependency and relentlessness into the four-minute anthem and made the slang, “Nothing Dey Happen”, a thing. Eedris Abdulkareem’s iconic “Mr. Lecturer” also turned the word into an axiom for sexual harassment in Nigeria’s higher institutions.
As the years have passed, the thematic underpinning of these slangs has undergone marked changes from the core socio-economic charges of the early 2000s to mirror the pomp and Instagrammable hedonism of the 2010s, and Afropop has played a role in heralding these changes. While in the 00s, D’Banj’s “Koko” got spawned into various variations of itself, finding a way into the telecommunication, food, and lifestyle industries, it was the arrival of Wizkid and his intuitive ability to conjure hit singles and inspire cultural frenzy that set the ball rolling. “Pakurumo”, one of Wizkid’s earliest singles, was a marker of his potentiality for transcending music-making to impact the body of popular language as the term, Pakurumo, took on a bigger urgency in the day-to-day lives of people across the federation and beyond.
The 2010s largely gave way to buzzing slangs – preferably with buzzing dance styles – as a form of cultural apotheosis, and nobody quite owned the intersection of popular slangs and pop music like Olamide. Upon leaving the ID Cabasa-led Coded Tunes, the Bariga native’s first album was titled Yahoo Boy No Laptop (YBNL), a clever play on the fraud allegations that dogged him, and one that attained mass appeal and critical attention. At that time, Olamide began to piece together the beginning of the insane run that made him one of the 2010’s most defining Afropop acts, and throughout the decade, Olamide coloured his often-visceral hooks and bars with inventive slangs and colloquialisms that would have an outsized effect on the culture and language (Sneh, Duro Soke, and Shakiti Bobo).
The evolving success of Nigerian music and its decamping to areas of relative wealth juxtaposed with the rise of indigenous rhymers like DaGrin, Reminisce, and Olamide as the 2010s thrummed on, which set the pace for a fresh glut of slangs to rise from the places that birthed these artistes. As the epicenter of popular music converged on the island and other tangential locations, it necessitated the existence of an other to accommodate the dreams and aspirations of musicians from other locations in the city, birthing the ‘streets’ terminology that is now one of Afropop’s most enduring totems. With time, the music coming out from that part of town, chronicling the weird, oft-fatalistic realities of young people, took new meaning and sprouted newer cant like the previously derisory “local rapper” quip that was reclaimed powerfully on Reminisce’s “Local Rapper”.
Phyno, a guest on that song, benefitted from the micro-triggers of the streets’ influence, dropping his classic single, “Alobam”, to widespread positive reception; as a mark of how successful “Alobam” became, it became a slang to express affection among loved ones. Just a year after “Alobam,” a song by Festac rapper, YCee, took the word Jagaban into the pop argot, transforming it from its previously political connotation to have mainstream meaning as any person of influence.
A series of middling slangs made 2018 one of Afropop’s more interesting years: Wizkid’s “everything stew”, a holdover from the “Fever” video promo was trifling if not unremarkable, while Duncan Mighty’s comeback link-up with Davido and Peruzzi resulted in the entrenchment of “aza” as a substitute for bank account details. By the late 2010s, music from the streets of Lagos had permeated almost every part of popular Nigerian culture and the Shaku Shaku, a novel mutation of streets music built around the guttural arrangement of Gqom, South Africa’s traditional electronic dance subgenre, was crafting a path to the mainstream. Songs like DJ Sidez’s “Oshozondi”, Mr. Real’s “Legbegbe”, and Idowest’s “Shepeteri” introduced the Nigerian public to their bombastic music as well as the sprightly slangs that made their songs addictive. Oshozondi/Saint Sami Ganja was envisioned to mean a life of the party who spent heavily and Shepeteri referred to the ghetto culture that inspired their music. Another slang, “Ji Masun”, popularized by Idowest became the spur-of-the-moment for much of 2018.
In the last quarter of 2018, a young rapper named Zlatan took to shouting the ad-lib “Gbe body e” over zesty beats that marked the birth of his signature zanku music, often interchanging it with “Gbe soul e” for maximal effect. Much like Ji Masun, Gbe body e was an invocation to work hard and not give up, and paired with the Zanku culture and Zlatan’s work ethic the ad-libs became slangs that became an inescapable presence after an electrifying showing on Burna Boy’s “Killin Dem”. Zlatan’s success and his dalliance with Naira Marley set off one of the most inspired years in Afropop history, with Marley going on to release a canon of singles that elevated him to stardom despite spending considerable time incarcerated. His collaboration with Young Jonn, “Mafo”, a defiant pop anthem became another successful drop turning the single’s title into an exhortation and ubiquitous slang.
Through this all, the next frontier of Afropop slang is being decided by the up-and-coming generation of street popstars. Taking inspiration from street pop’s ever-changing pulse and Marley’s Opor, MohBad and Rexxie came up with the minimalist hit, “KPK”, an abbreviation of “Ko Po Ke”, a Yoruba phrase expressing delight at bountifulness. Straddling the intersection of mainstream music and street sensibilities, Mayorkun has established himself as a veritable slang machine, birthing the crisp but pure “of Lagos” tag and following it up with “this bread no be Agege”.
As Nigerian pop’s greatest synthesiser, Davido has demonstrated a knack for taking parts of the culture and reconfiguring them in new and exciting ways that increase reach. After a video of the “Jowo” singer working in the studio with Bad Boy Timz captioned “Hit Choke” went viral in January, the latest viral slang, “E Choke”, started to gain momentum, leading to its present position in pop vocabulary. With Nigerian music ascending to global fame, the results of our slangs are more decidedly global as the video of Drake admirably trying to say “e choke” when he linked with Davido in March proved.
For the conceivable future, slangs will be a fixture of our music because the heterogeneity of Nigeria does not make it feasible that we have a central language. What that means is that, through the creolization of our languages into a hybrid communication system, we will find ways to convey our most urgent desires and feelings in wide-ranging slangs that the Internet will help proliferate. And because the work of pop music often comes down to reflecting the times it exists in, musicians will seek out the words that move the masses or attempt to come up with the words that will define our daily lives.
E CHOKE! pic.twitter.com/4kcRYJIwHq
— The NATIVE (@NativeMag) March 13, 2021
@walenchi Is A Lagos-Based Writer Interested In The Intersection Of Popular Culture, Music, And Youth Lifestyle.
ICYMI: THE BIGGEST AFROPOP TRENDS COME FROM THE STREETS, BUT WHO PROFITS?
Afropop is the love child of its many influences
In a reversal of events at the turn of the 2000s, Afropop is profoundly reshaping the texture of music...
Over the last two and a half years, some of Afropop’s biggest stars have denounced the genre to advance their personal agendas. In a wide-ranging interview from 2023 with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe just ahead of the release of his last album, ‘I Told Them…,’ Burna Boy derided Afrobeats for a perceived lack of contextual subject matter. “Afrobeats, as people call it, it’s mostly about nothing, literally nothing,” he said. “There’s no substance to it. Nobody’s talking about anything. It’s just a great time, it’s an amazing time. But at the end of the day, life is not an amazing time.”
Just a few months later, Nigerian music superstar, Wizkid, also disavowed the genre, claiming that he was not an Afrobeats act and that his then-forthcoming album, ‘Morayo,’ would not be an Afrobeats album as he considered the genre – and the classification it infers – too limiting for the type of music he made. Predictably, fans were incensed by both artists’ stances and the casual dismissal of the genre that their statements invited. What was almost lost in the whirlwind of that discourse is that for all the attempts to capture the totality of African music under the loaded ‘Afrobeats’ label, African music has never been just one thing; and, in that spirit, Afrobeats itself has always been all-welcoming of a multiplicity of influences and styles.
From its earliest iteration, Afropop has always been a potpourri of sounds that took influences from various parts of the Black diaspora and distilled them with an African sensibility. The work of early Afrobeats pioneers like Junior and Pretty is a direct descendant of the burgeoning Hip-Hop blueprint of the ‘80s; while the early 2000s popularity of Ajegunle-based rabble-rousers like Daddy Showkey, Danfo Drivers, and African China occurred tangentially to the rising profile of Reggae on a global scale. The mid-2000s to early 2010s saw the arrival of several dulcet-toned singers like Banky W and Tiwa Savage rooted in the R&B and Soul traditions, introducing a slicker dimension to Nigerian popular music. As always, homegrown stars adapted these foreign styles for their own market while continuing to work on a distinctive style that centered genuine indigenous expression and ingenuity.
Over the years, the fruit of those experiments has ripened to produce a scene that’s bustling with life and talent. As the genre has attained global attention, many sub-genres have come to the fore, showcasing the depth of African music on a global scale. If Wizkid’s sonorous melodies and unbeatable charisma made him the sun of Afrobeats in the 2010s, Olamide’s militaristic bars and Pop anthems rooted in their street sensibilities mark him out as the genre’s moon. It was on Oamide’s back that a nascent indigenous rap circuit rested. Taking the mantle of DaGrin, the Bariga-raised rapper who helped institutionalize rapping in Nigerian languages with cult classics like “Eni Duro” and “Voice Of The Street.” Along with the effort of other stars like Reminisce, Phyno, Lil Kesh, and CDQ, the indigenous rap movement gained steam and, recognizing the Nigerian market’s zest for melodies, soon morphed into Street-Pop, a distinct hybridization of local genres like Fuji, Apala, and Highlife.
Inspired by the work of their forebearers, a new crop of artists have taken Street-Pop to new heights. Zlatan and Naira Marley served as a transitory generation; together with Rexxie, they patented a more melodic take on Street-Pop while infusing a devil-may-care disposition that launched them to the top of Nigerian music. It is fitting that Olamide was the one to hand the baton to Asake, the biggest Street-Pop star of the moment. Similar to the YBNL head’s legendary album run, Asake has released three albums and one extended play in three years, each coming out to a world paying more and more attention to his work. Impressively, Asake has also established himself as a global touring star, regularly playing sold out arena concerts across the world with a music style that is rooted in Yoruba oral tradition.
Asake is not spreading the Street-Pop gospel alone, though. Ikorodu star, Seyi Vibez, has also grabbed mainstream attention for his gritty take on the genre. Initially a divisive figure, his 2023 song, “Different Pattern,” saw him reach a new level of cultural relevance in 2024 and his new extended play, ‘Children Of Africa,’ arrived in February 2025, marking a new era in his career. The yearning for a reclamation of cultural heritage that has created a Street-Pop golden era has not evaded other parts of Nigeria. Shallipopi’s drawling, sprawled-out sound mimics the playful pulse of South-South pidgin while Jeriq, hailing from Nigeria’s South-East, has emerged as one of Nigeria’s most acclaimed rappers. Outside Nigeria, there’s a yearning in Ghana to preserve the purity and history of its Highlife genre, an elemental component of Afrobeats. British-Ghanaian producer, Juls’, ‘PALMWINE DIARIES’ and ‘High Life Sessions,’ both pulsate with the beguiling riffs of the storied genre while the work of Nigerian brother-duo, The Cavemen, is reintroducing Eastern Nigerian highlife to a new generation of listeners.
A youth-led zest for exploration outside the framework of Afropop has also produced a sub-culture that rejects the tenets of mainstream conservatism. Beginning as a band of friends and collaborators who prioritized freewheeling experimentation, Alte music has emerged as one of the most important sonic evolutions of the last two decades. First championed by OG pioneers like DRB Lasgidi, LOS, and Show Dem Camp, the Alte community drew in left-field thinkers and madcap auteurs setting the stage for a new generation of stars to emerge from the depths of SoundCloud circa 2016. In the hands of stars like Odunsi (The Engine), Cruel Santino, and Lady Donli, the Alte experiment reached an unprecedented level of critical and commercial success.
Odunsi’s ‘rare.,’ throbbing with influences from ‘70s Disco and Funk, sits in the canon of great Nigerian debuts and Lady Donli’s ‘Enjoy Your Life’ artfully melded Folk music with Afrobeat and Soul across its 15 tracks. Taken along with the work of producers like GMK and Genio Bambino, these acts built a community that successfully created the blueprint for a sound that reflected the tensions and joys of younger Nigerians who saw life in a specific fashion. It even took flight beyond the borders of Nigeria with a young Amaarae cutting her teeth working alongside some of the most prominent names in the Alte community. The inventiveness and clarity of vision that the community prioritises is evident across both of the Ghanaian-American artist’s albums, ‘The Angel You Don’t Know’ and ‘Fountain Baby.’
In a reversal of events at the turn of the 2000s when Afropop was heavily influenced by outside sounds and genres, music from the continent is profoundly reshaping the texture of music outside its borders. Much like how the Windrush Generation and other immigrants from the West Indies helped to introduce Britain to Reggae, Dancehall and Soca, generations of African immigrants are making music that signals their African heritage, with Afropop as a base influence. The rise in popularity of African sounds has helped UK artists mesh the lingo and sonics from the continent into their work, creating a new genre referred to as Afroswing. Taking influences from Afrobeat, Dancehall, and Grime, Afroswing is distinctive for its use of lyrics from Africa with British rapper, J Hus, credited as one of its pioneers. Songs like J Hus’ “Did You See,” Ramz’s “Barking,” and Not3s’s “Aladdin” signal to the sound of the homeland and speak to Afrobeats’ incredible stride to global popularity as a base reference point for global Black music.
Nearly a decade out from “One Dance,” the Drake, Wizkid, and Kyla collab that pushed Afropop into a different stratosphere, the genre is in safe hands with several stars emerging across different sub-genres that speak to our past, present and future. It is perhaps more than the pioneers imagined when they were making music all those years ago, but all the roads have led here to Afropop being a global sensation that offers various forms of expression to a watching world. There are no limitations on what can be done within the genre, that sense of open-endedness and possibility was always our strength, and it’s why Afropop will stand the test of time.
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Togo YEYE & VLISCO’s new collaboration is a celebration of Lomé’s thriving creative scene
Togo YEYE is a community we are building for us by
Togo YEYE, a creative duo formed by Lomé-based creative director Malaika Nabillatou and London-based photographer Delali Ayivi, is a conceptual publication that was created to empower and champion Togo’s young fashion creatives. Since its inception in 2021, Togo YEYE has released several personal projects and has also partnered with a number of brands to further its hugely imaginative aesthetic mandate. For their latest collaboration, Togo YEYE teamed up with textile printing company VLISCO to present Blossoming Beauty. Tagged as a love letter to Togo’s creative community, the campaign captures Lomé’s scenic beauty alongside VLISCO’s vibrant prints with the aim of connecting the feminine grace of nature with identity and artistry.
What does Togo YEYE mean?
Malaika Nabilatou: My name is Malaika Nabilatou, I’m the creative director of Togo YEYE. I’m Togolese and I was born and grew up in Lomé. I see myself as a West African creative director and I’m working to be the best in a few years. Togo YEYE means new Togo in Ewe, one of the most popular languages spoken in the South of Togo.
What inspired you to create Togo YEYE?
Malaika Nabilatou: We started this project, my friend Delali and I, 5 years ago. We just wanted to show that Togolese youth are also creative. Togo YEYE is a community we are building for us by us. It wasn’t just a project for Delali and I. It’s become something for the creative scene of Lomé. Lomé is like our studio.
What role does Togolese culture play in your creative process?
Maryline Bolognima: For me, Togolese culture comes first. For example, in the South, there are the people of Anero. If you come, you can go to Anero. In the North, there are the Evals, so if you come to Togo, you’ll learn a lot.
What’s the most exciting part of working as a team on projects like this?
Malaika Nabilatou: I need to tell the truth, we dreamt about this campaign before [it happened]. When VLISCO contacted us, we were like wow. I can’t really explain how thankful we are to VLISCO for trusting us. Because it’s a risk that they took by trusting us, making that campaign here with our team and honestly we are going to keep it in our hearts for the rest of our lives.
Claudia Sodogbe: For me, it is the first big contract of my life that I had with Togo YEYE. I still remember, on the last day of the shoot, I was feeling nostalgic about separating from the teams and the others. It went well in any case, and I’m very grateful to have been on this project.
What has been your proudest moment as part of Togo YEYE?
Malaika Nabilatou: I think the proudest moment I had with this campaign was when I saw the result first on the website. When I saw the story, I was like “wow, we finally made it.”
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The Cathartic Melodies Of Mereba
Ahead of the release of ‘The Breeze Grew A Fire,’ we sat down with Mereba to discuss putting together her...
Mereba exudes a palpable warmth. When she speaks, as she did with me via Zoom one evening in late January, she’s gentle and perceptive, speaking in soft, meandering passages that paint an intimate portrait of the LA-based singer’s mind. Similarly, her stirring discography, which dates back to 2013, evokes a keen sense of serene intimacy. “I’m inspired by those little moments in life where you’re like “Ah that’s really beautiful,”” she tells me halfway into our conversation, making sense of the ethereal quality that her music possesses. “It could be an interaction between two people, it could be something in nature, it could be a memory I have. Those are the moments that drive me to go get my guitar and write a song.”
The 34-year-old singer, songwriter, producer and instrumentalist has been writing songs for as long as she can remember. Growing up between Alabama, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, as well as an unintended one-year stint in her father’s native Ethiopia, ensured that Mereba picked up a wealth of influences that would go on to inform her richly diverse and understated sound. After years living across multiple cities, she finally settled in Atlanta where she became a staple in the city’s indie music circuit. “There, I met my peers who I made music with and are still my peers to this day. People like J.I.D, 6LACK and my crew. We all were just coming up during a really rich time of music there so that was a big part of my journey,” she reminisces fondly.
In the years that Mereba lived in Atlanta, she released 2013’s ‘Room For Living’ and ‘Kotton House Vol 1,’ two extended plays that neatly outline the foundations of the balmy and eclectic style that she would perfect years later, leaving ample room for her soothing vocals and evocative songwriting to shine. She also joined Spillage Village, a musical collective that comprises others like Earth Gang and JID, contributing to various releases like ‘Bears Like This Too Much’ and the critically acclaimed ‘Spilligion.’ Following her time in Atlanta, Mereba moved again, this time to Los Angeles, where she signed her first major record deal and released her debut album ‘The Jungle Is The Only Way Out.’
Since the release of ‘The Jungle Is The Only Way Out’ in 2019, Mereba has continued to hone her unique sound, continually experimenting and ironing out the rich textures of her temperate style on subsequent releases like 2021’s ‘AZEB.’ Ahead of the release of ‘The Breeze Grew A Fire,’ her first project in four years, we sat down with the LA-based singer to discuss the story behind her well-received debut, her various influences as well as the process of putting together her highly-anticipated new album.
This is your first album in about five years. How are you feeling?
I feel really excited. I’m definitely excited to give my music back to the world again. I’m also ready for connection, performing the songs, and sharing these new stories.
You’ve been making music for a long time now, but do you still feel any nerves before a major release like this?
I don’t know if it’s nerves. I think I feel anxious about the fact that the music is being released and people are going to hear it. But I guess I’m anxious in a good way for them to hear the music, to get to experience what I’ve been toiling away at and what I’ve been excited about for a while. It’s more like a good anxiety.
I think the first time I came across your music was in 2019. I heard “Heatwave” with 6LACK off of your debut album ‘The Jungle Is The Only Way Out.’ I believe that album was sort of a breakthrough moment for you. Can you tell me a bit about how it came together?
That album coming together was quite a journey. I started ‘The Jungle Is The Only Way Out’ years before it came out. I had left Atlanta and moved to L.A at this point. I didn’t know so many people when I just moved and so I was kind of starting over in certain ways. I was writing a lot of songs that felt really powerful to me but they were sonically different from what I used to make before. I was also learning how to produce, I was in Ableton learning how to make beats and just produce my music. Because I didn’t know so many people, I couldn’t outsource some of these things so I was just experimenting on my sound on my own.
Over the years, the community that I was a part of in Atlanta, everyone started finding their way in music but we still stayed closely in touch even though I had moved to L.A. I featured on a song with J.I.D and that kind of got me back into making music properly again because at that point, I was working random jobs, my car got taken and I had to start taking the bus to work. I was living a completely different life. It was my friends that put me back in the zone. They would invite me to sessions and just remind me that I wanted to do this music thing. Then I started putting together songs I had made over the years like “Sandstorm” and “Heatwave” with 6LACK which we made way before the album came out and even my solo songs like “Black Truck.” Most of the songs on that album had come from that period where I was struggling but knowing I was meant for music somehow.
How many years did it take to put your first album together?
I’ll say about four to five years. They say you write your first album for your whole life. “Highway 10” is the first song I made on that album. I made that song in 2014 and the album came out in 2019. In the years before the album came out I was signed to a bad record deal and I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t release music. All I could do was just create and that ended up forcing me to just hone in on my sound.
After your debut, you released an EP titled ‘AZEB’ two years later. Listening to that project, it felt lighter than your debut which was a lot darker and more melancholic. Do you remember what headspace you were in when you made this EP?
I was definitely feeling a lot lighter when I was making ‘AZEB.’ I felt like I had shed a lot of the weight that I carried during all those years of uncertainty. I was in a much more hopeful place when I was making one-half of the project. The other half was made during the early days of the pandemic so it was like a mix. Songs like “Rider,” “Beretta,” and “My Moon,” those songs represent beautiful, light type feelings to me while some of the other songs like “News Come,” and “Another Kin” are more intense lyrically and sonically.
Let’s talk about ‘The Breeze Grew A Fire.’ How did you land on that as the title for your second album?
The making of that title was different from how I titled my other projects. It didn’t come to me right away and I decided to not force it, I believed it was going to come eventually. So the making of this album has always felt very gentle. In contrast to what I had been through for so many years, I felt like I was in a much softer space creating this album and this feeling of a breeze just kept coming to me. It was also kind of like springtime going into the summer and the idea of a breeze became so prominent that I was going to title the album breeze. But as I continued on the journey of finishing it, it felt like the album was saying something a bit more. I realized that the album wasn’t just about all these gentle feelings and relationships I’m singing about like friendship, family, and my son but these things also inspire me to live with purpose, conviction and to have a spark in me. Things that make people “strong” are inspired by these little moments and experiences that we have and less by the force of trying to make a fire forcefully.
You co-produced “Phone Me” and “Counterfeit,” the lead singles for this project and you’ve also produced a lot of your older stuff as well. I’m curious to know how taking the reins on the production side affects your music-making process in general.
I got really into producing during that period when I felt lost in life. I got into Ableton, playing the guitar on my computer, sampling my voice and just experimenting. So songs that I produced from ‘The Jungle Is The Only Way Out’ like “Sandstorm” and “Kinfolk,” were me experimenting a lot with learning how to produce. With this new album, the first two singles were heavily produced by my co-producer Sam Hoffman. When he sends me things that I like, I’ll add things to them and it could be the opposite as well where I produce a song and I’ll have him or another friend add something to it. That process is personal because I could completely be in my world and get the feelings that I want to convey out through production as well as writing the song out lyrically. When I unlocked that part of myself, it felt like my whole life that’s what I’ve been wanting to do. To be able to make the music arrangements and compositions come to life.
A lot of the time I would start with a simple beat or drum loop and I’ll build chords over it with my guitar. I experiment with writing when it’s bare and then fill in the production as I write the song. They’re a very interwoven process.
I’ve read that you’re heavily influenced by legendary acts like Stevie Wonder and Lauryn Hill. Are there other acts that inspire you when it comes to the production side of music specifically?
That’s a great question. In certain ways, I’ll say it’s the same people that I look up to because most of them produce. Interestingly enough, what I love most about these musicians is that they are very involved in the sonics of the music they’re making. So the people that you mentioned, like Stevie Wonder who mentored me and encouraged me to continue on the path of producing my music versus being a singer who works with a producer. I feel like it’s important to the language of an artist to at least know how to contribute in some way to the sonics of their music.
I’ll say Quincy Jones is the blueprint for me just because of the span of work that he did. He’s the concept of producer I’d like to work towards in my life.
Do you have a favourite memory from creating ‘The Breeze Grew A Fire’?
There are a few. There was a time when I made this song on the album called “Hawk.” The song is dedicated to a really dear friend of mine who passed away unexpectedly in 2021. It was not easy to write and when I first wrote the song, it was sad, slow and reflective of the whole situation. I listened to it after I made it and I started thinking about my friend and the things that he liked. He was a very expressive and hilarious person who loved dancing and dance music. At that moment a light bulb went up and I felt like the song needed to be more of a dance song because I wanted to make something that he would love and not something he would think is corny. It was a really beautiful moment musically and personally.
If there’s one thing you would like your fans or listeners to take away from ‘A Breeze Grew A Fire,’ what would it be?
I hope it brings a sense of comfort and warmth. I also hope it tells a clear story of what matters to me. I just really hope it makes people feel better, that’s really it. I think it’s one of those albums where it’s a personal album for me and I think it’s meant for personal moments too. I hope it lives in people’s lives in comforting ways.
Listen to ‘A Breeze Grew A Fire’ here
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