Obongjayar: Just My Luck

The wild imagination that conjured up this Independence Day meets Notting Hill movie narrative to the soundtrack of Westlife remains hard at work. Obongjayar’s debut album ‘Some Nights I Dream Of Doors’ arrived in 2022 following a commitment to experiment and strike upon something new. This quest was not in vain - the work garnered huge critical acclaim which pocketed him an Ivor Novello award for best album. “It felt amazing, especially as it was my first record, but I don’t think I know how you enjoy a thing like that,” he reflects. “The success for me is when you finish a project and you know you’ve got a good thing.” Obongjayar – or OB as he goes by – is simmering in that feeling now, with new LP ‘PARADISE NOW’ wrapped and ready to sling out into the world.

For those who don’t know Obongjayar by name, they’ll certainly be acquainted with his unique vocal-stamp. Gifted with a tenor that’s incomparable - equal parts masculine and feminine, somehow gravelly and tender all at once - the melodies he mines are infectious, idiosyncratic and turn in a way you least expect. It’s why Little Simz has tapped him in for guest spots on multiple occasions – his vocal on ‘Point and Kill’ made for a highlight on her tour-de-force ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’; he also lent a fierce vocal to the lead single from her new LP ‘Flood’. 

“The one in front of my family, easily. I don’t get nervous playing shows. Years ago, I was playing a show with a friend and I thought we needed like five days of rehearsal,” he laughs. “My friend was like, ‘I haven’t got five days’. He explained to me - you wrote the thing, you did the thing, you’ve already got it right because you did it. Once you start thinking about hitting the right bits, you’ve fucked it because you’ve taken the fun out of it.”

During the aforementioned Fred performance - which finds him conducting the arena effortlessly into a mass singalong - OB is adorned in a white tee with the phrase ‘Just My Luck’ plastered across it in a splat of red. The expression appears to be a mantra of sorts for him, and is immortalised on ‘PARADISE NOW’ in a sharp, funky ode to the FOMO felt from putting his craft before partying. “Just my luck / I’m in the wrong place making a good time,” he sings, silkily traversing the track’s bubbling beats.

“It took me back to college,” he reflects. “When you’re a kid, the world revolves around that sort of thing - the need to be a part of a clique. I lived so far away from where all my friends were and they would be like, ‘do you wanna come to this thing?’ The buses and trains stopped at certain times and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get home so I’d stay in and write because I wanted to be a musician. It’s a lonely road getting to the point where you know yourself.”

‘PARADISE NOW’ seems to represent the destination at the end of this lonesome road. “It’s about enjoying being where you are now, man. And not dreaming up a place where you think you should be. I’ve learned to be content.” The album often wrestles between two places, symptomatic of this philosophy; sparser tracks like ‘Holy Mountain’ and ‘Prayer’ brush shoulders with the high-octane rushes of ‘Jellyfish’ and ‘Talk Olympics’. Sometimes two worlds collide within the same track - ‘Life Ahead’ finds OB shapeshifting from a forlorn falsetto to a monstrous snarl, injecting a Jekyll and Hyde quality to its study of family dynamics. “Go ahead, wear that smile for your mother like there’s nothing wrong,” the voice encourages.

As a result, ‘PARADISE NOW’ offers a varied sequencing, ping-ponging between these two channels before either side of the coin wears too thin. The Yin and Yang is also reflective of his upbringing split between Nigeria and the UK; he made the permanent move to London as a teenager. “To me, London has always had more of a structure to it, whereas West Nigeria is more of a no man’s land,” he explains. “There’s systems in the UK that are designed to help people even though they’re currently being torn down. There’s a lot of figuring out to do in Nigeria as a result - every day is like a maze, the way you got somewhere yesterday is not the same way you get there the next day. I think both places have done great [things] for me.”

While groove and movement were the LP’s leading principles, the songwriting greats were pinned on the inspiration moodboard - and not just Brian McFadden et al. “Say whatever you want about Westlife, man. But those songs are beautiful. They are incredibly written pop songs,” he asserts. “I was listening to a lot of Prince and Bowie. Some of the big mega hits. I was studying them thinking, ‘why is ‘Life On Mars’ or ‘Purple Rain’ so popular?’ These anomalies which follow a certain structure that somehow isn’t bubblegum; monumental without being conventional.” This line of questioning set a direction for the album.

Alongside the artistry of Prince and Bowie, Rishi Sunak was an unlikely figure pinned to the same mood board. “‘Jellyfish’ is about how spineless Rishi Sunak was at the time of writing,” he says. OB argues, however, that the song is a template you could ascribe to almost every prime minister or president. “They’re all the same,” he shrugs.

The song itself repels relentlessly at breakneck speed with a scattershot drumbeat thrumming beneath decaying synths. “Bombs bombs bombs falling from the sky / bombs bombs bombs by the stars and stripes,” OB raps. Its timeless quality is already applicable. On the same day of our conversation, Trump’s cabinet is thrown into hot water for carelessly discussing an airstrike in the same insouciant manner of planning a night out, flame emojis and all.

Shooting from the same hip is the excellently titled ‘Talk Olympics’ featuring Little Simz. A wandering bassline smooths the jagged edges of a crackling snare drum as the pair take aim at the high-falutin tone of political discussions online in hyperspeed. “It’s those people that just have a say on everything but have absolutely no fucking clue what they’re talking about,” he explains. It brings to mind the people who claim expertise after reading one article on a topic or a few YouTube explainers. “If you’re gonna do it, do it. You don’t need to tell me about it, bro,” he laughs. “They’re not saying anything and just saying things that everybody else has already said.”

With Simz repaying the favour on ‘PARADISE NOW’, one wonders whether magic always strikes when the pair are in the studio. “Yeah, it’s proven itself. It’s just fun. We just go in and make the thing happen,” he nods. “She knows her voice and it’s very easy to just be yourself. If you’re not comfortable being yourself around someone else, you’re not making anything of worth. Music takes trust. We’re just making a tune, it’s a song - it’s not that deep.” 

“The big one was Interstellar. I watched so much stuff around that,” he says. The 2013 Christopher Nolan flick finds Matthew McConaughey scaling black holes and other dimensions in the hunt for a habitable planet as his earthbound daughter interprets and communicates his findings. “In a nutshell, it’s a love story between a father and his daughter. You can go searching the universe and save the world, then you go figure out that all you really needed was the love of your child. That’s what it’s about, but you wouldn’t necessarily think that if you saw it for the first time. It inspired the way I wrote the record. I just wanted to go straight for the jugular and cut all the fat out. The things I’m saying lyrically are very simple but not too on the nose.”

No doubt Nolan would have saved some budget on the FX had he followed the same school of thought. OB mines familial wisdom on the warm synthy catharsis of ‘Born In This Body’, which rings with the clarity he was seeking. “Six years old standing in the front room, told my Grandma I’m ugly / She sat down with a smile and told me you’re worried about the wrong thing,” he sings. Family is a theme that runs through the veins of the LP, from the album’s wounded opener ‘It’s Time’ to the open call to arms of ‘Prayer’, which lands underpinned by a hypnotic, lumbering sub-bass. These moments seem to dance in the spirit exalted from the performance in front of his mother and siblings. “Music was not a thing or supposed to be the thing,” he continues. “What it took for me to be in that position where I can bring a film crew to my Mum’s house and say, ‘I’m gonna sing you this song I wrote’; it’s so momentous.”

All it seemed to take was clarity and a surrender to the present moment, while still acknowledging all the messiness that comes with that - a feeling that he’s lovingly bottled on ‘PARADISE NOW’. “You can plug in the aux cord and it doesn’t disrupt, or you can pay attention to what’s going on within it. I think I achieved that for better or worse, who knows?” he ponders. “I’m just happy with what I’ve made.”

‘Paradise Now’ is out on 30th May via September Recordings.

Tags: Features, In Deep, Obongjayar