Tems is choking up. We’re midway through a conversation that has felt philosophical, warm and animated – soaked in feeling. In the past, the singer has been described as someone whose voice is ‘unchangingly mellow’. Not so today. With just the faintest crack in her voice, she describes feeling ‘blessed’ and grateful to have lived a life filled with love.
The Nigerian-born, London-based singer-songwriter and producer – who has become the face of the wildly popular Afrobeats movement that has taken over the world – is set on remaining true to these feelings and to herself, ‘true to my arts and true to my music’. She has worked with (or for) some of the biggest pop artists of the decade: Beyoncé, Rihanna, Drake and Justin Bieber, to name a few. She’s won a Grammy, been nominated for an Academy Award for her writing work on Black Panther’s ‘Lift Me Up’ and turned heads with an audacious look for the ceremony.
Born Temilade Openiyi, Tems, 28, was brought up by her mother in Lagos, Nigeria after her parents’ divorce. A self-confessed introvert, she was a shy child, and says she had tricky, lonely teenage years, moving through depressive states and what sounds like a general sense of nihilism. ‘When you’re a teenager, you feel as though no one understands you, and it’s you against the world,’ she says. In hindsight, she knows it was ‘all about perception’, but that didn’t make it easier at the time.
She turned to music and poetry to help see her through: joining a choir; writing dozens of songs and poems about her life experiences. Immediately following school, however, she reluctantly moved to South Africa to study economics, after which she got a 9 to 5 job back in Nigeria; it felt like ‘prison’ to her. ‘It’s suffocating because when you don’t enjoy it... you’re not passionate about it. So the job you’re doing is just average. You’re not getting better. Just floating, trying to not fall. And that’s no way to live.’ She says all of this as if she’s delivering a sermon. ‘I was just like, “I’m going to bet on myself. I don’t care where I end up. I’m going to start, take action, do something.
The bet paid off. Her independently released breakout single ‘Mr Rebel’ came out in 2018, and much has been made of her seemingly seamless transition from an unsigned, low-key Lagosian girlie, working in digital marketing and producing her own tracks, to one of few Nigerian women to dominate the global mass market.
After ‘Mr Rebel’ took off, Tems was introduced to a myriad of players within the music industry and eventually ended up signing with RCA Records in 2021. She has become one of a growing number of women who have changed the face of what her peer Tiwa Savage has called a ‘male-dominated’ Afrobeats genre; the biggest names in the game are arguably Wizkid and Burna Boy (both of whom have made history with sold-out UK stadium shows in the past two years, millions of streams and reams of prestigious awards).
Afrobeats artists are dominating and crossing over into different genres, with Tems at the forefront of the shift. Working with Beyoncé, whose music has always been a huge inspiration to her, was a highlight – their track on Renaissance ‘Move’, also featuring Grace Jones, is a sashaying, body-pumping call-to-arms. Tems chants the short, sweet interlude: ‘Who this girl in the back of the room?/ It’s the groove, it’s the Yoncé groove/ It’s a party in the hotel room.’ She’s been to see Beyoncé on tour, but have they recorded the music video yet?
‘I’m the wrong person to ask!’ Tems laughs, cracking her first full-throttle smile.‘Beyoncé, girl, I’m ready. Any time she wants to pick up the phone, anything she wants to do, if she wants to release another album tomorrow, I’m there. I love everything she does,’ she says. She is also hoping to do more collaborations with African artists. ‘I’ve been working with some Nigerian artists. I feel like everybody from back home is killing it. I would love to work with all of them.’
Her music, from the earnest plea of 2020’s ‘Damages’ to her iconic feature on Wizkid’s intoxicating 2021 single ‘Essence’, is the type to be played on repeat, with esoteric lyrics sung in her uniquely rich, nasal tone – melodic beats and a vibrato that could move mountains.
Now spending a lot of time in the studio, she’s not sure whether the music she’s developing at the moment will be for an album or an EP. Either way, her creativity is abundant. She is in a period of regeneration. ‘This season really is just about shedding. Shedding dead weight, shedding dead skin, shedding things that are not me,’ she says. She won’t be pulled into conversation about the people and things she’s letting go of, preferring, perhaps as a form of protection, to speak about bigger themes rather than specific experiences.
But she intimates it relates to her journey in the music industry. ‘I have learned so much, and I’ve had to learn so much,’ she sighs. ‘I was super naive, as most people are that have a dream. You don’t realise the loss, or the things that you have to deal with, when you achieve this dream.’For someone like Tems, it’s clear, anything that isn’t an evolution is damaging. And she was called, irrevocably, passionately, to music.
Now that her professional ambitions are (at least partially) satisfied, she has reframed her life around fulfilment. ‘I want to be someone that is full of love, peace, joy and care,’ she says. ‘My new dream is just to be the most evolved person I can ever be.
This interview appears in the October ELLE UK issue.
