So I was thinking today on how listeners will choose to categorize my new music. Then I moved on to imagining people listening to my music in their cars, on their headphones, in the bedrooms and it hit me—that once we release this new music the definition of what it is and what category it fits is irrelevant if the music and the lyrics and everything that makes it a song—IS GOOD. This new music is no more mine than it is David Franz and Francis Phan, my producers in this project, no more mine than the people that are listening— that will listen.
THIS music we are creating may or may not be for the average people. The point was NOT to smooth out the edges of music and let us twist it into what we think mainstream will run towards. Mass marketing is the strategy of making average products for average people but I believe as artists we have a responsibility to the art we take so much time and heart to create to tag the level of ABOVE average and search for the fruit in a melody that grips the inspiration of exceptional. I want to listen to a song 5 times in a row if i want to and not feel like it doesn’t speak to me any less the first time or the last.
I remember growing up in a small apartment in Mission Hill, a neighborhood in Boston. I remember my brother Okoduwa falling in love with a song pressing rewind on the tape deck and playing it over and over and over again. After about the 100th time my other brother Omoizele who shared the same room with him would scream something in the likes of “Really OKODUWA?!? REALLY are you going to play that SONG AGAIN?!? Of course for me it was quite entertaining to watch this exchange go down— but what it also did besides entertain me was to help me understand early on in my life the power music had to move you to do impractical things—- like listen to something 100 times in a row.
i can proudly testify that I do the same. I can’t help but love what I love when it comes to music and if I DON’T play my favorite song mainstream radio may not either. So play that song 100 times a day if you dig it. I am likely going to do the same.
Also, I’d like to report the song my big brother Okoduwa currently has on repeat on his ipod is This Time Around (From the This Time Around EP). Yup, I’m keeping track 
-iyeoka
FACEBOOK COMMENTS:
Omoizele Oz Okoawo likes this.
Georgia MadwayI also remember this! It used to drive me crazy because it was often a song taken from some Broadway musical.
6 hours ago · Delete
Scott WoodsFascinating and hilarious. As someone who developed everyhing he knows and loves about music by listening through the locked doors of older brothers’ rooms and rifling through their collections while they were out, I SO get it.
6 hours ago · Delete
Pascale MartineauI seemed to have inherited that from my brothers as well. That’s the only way to fully appreciate a good jam, by breaking it in.
6 hours ago · Delete
Balogun Isaac OrawemeSo funny you should post this at this moment cos I’ve replayed Duane Stevenson – Cottage in Negril about 6 times already, and I still plan on playing it for as long as possible. Music is indeed powerful and just touches a part of the soul that nothing else seems to touch.
6 hours ago · Delete
dave ringhehe, oz looks like a debutante coming down those stairs ….
well i’ll come clean and admit i may have done that to “this is life” and “shine on” ….
5 hours ago · Delete