In a consumer landscape where attention spans evaporate faster than Nigerian mobile data on a bad day, a few creators still manage to cut through the noise with intention and clarity. Savy Henry is one of them.
His name continues to surface in the conversations about authentic music that defy the box of Africa’s pop scene, while building a community that cares. For this conversation with DigiMillennials, he answers questions by Itty Okim concerning his latest project, ‘Songs About You’, his creative process and what success looks like for him.
Songs About You took a while. Tell us everything that has led up to this moment
Excellence, you know. We were trying to put out an excellent project, so we kept going round and round.
How do you navigate the struggle of needing to express yourself, feed your fans and also trying to hold on until what you’re putting out is perfect?
I think the most important thing for me is that sometimes, I know when to say ‘I’m not doing anything again.’ Because the thing about making music is that if I listen to it today, I’m probably still going to hear that there’s something here that I should have corrected. The main thing is just knowing when to say it’s all enough and let it go, because you’ll wake up in the morning with a fresh pair of ears and a relaxed head and there’ll definitely be something askew you’re going to hear.
What are three songs by other singers you were listening to while you were making the project? Or three people.
I was listening to a lot of JP Sax actually. I was also listening to Jacob Collier. I was also listening to Jon Belion; there was something that he did in one of his songs in which he layered the instruments and I absolutely loved it and decided to try and replicate something like that on You (Without You).
You produced a good number of songs on the project. Was that intentional or did it just happen?
Yes it was intentional, because I didn’t have the money to pay anyone else.
What was it like working with Dunnie.
Working with Dunnie was fantastic. We were actually supposed to work on another song before now, but because of time difference and stuff, also because we wanted the song to be on the EP, we ended up not working on it. She had quite a lot of projects at the time, so when she had free time, she reached out like ‘how far, have you produced that one or do we work on something else?’ and that was when I sent her the All The Way demo. She was absolutely fantastic.
Do you ever feel like the niche of your style of music restricts your reach, that is, the number of people your music can get to?
I don’t, because I feel like the audience is there. The main issue I think that we have is the fact that the music isn’t exactly getting to them due to over saturation by all the other different sounds that we have in this region. We have an audience for Jon Bellion. If he did a show here in Nigeria people are going to be out there. Johnny Drille does Johnny’s Room Live here and even from the first one he did at Muri Okunola, the place was filled up. So it’s not like we don’t have the audience. We have the audience, but the reach is the problem. We need the sound, niche and genre to actually be amplified enough to reach them.
So you’re saying funding is the major problem?
Funding is one big problem. The market is there, we just need to get the music to them.
What do you think about media coverage on your kind of sound in Nigeria? Why do you think the investors are not seeing the potential you are seeing?
I don’t know, I can’t even say. Let me give you another instance. There’s this person I listen to a lot – Hunter Wave. He makes folk music and has about a million plus listeners, just off Spotify alone. Now, he is going on tour. He is not mainstream but he has millions of listeners. But it is a different case for us here in Nigeria that – for lack of a better description – sound like I do. We can barely really say that we’re going to go on tour, or use large venues. We would use really small venues, and it is because we don’t have enough coverage.
Shallipopi would get hundreds of blog reposts from one Snapchat story, but Dwin the Stoic wouldn’t get the same attention without having to pay heavily for it. There’s almost no earned media for guys like us. If we had something like that, that just shines a little light on us, it would work. And I don’t think that we’re looking to be number 1 on the charts, but let the music be heard. Nigerian music is beyond afropop.
Back to the music. What song did you enjoy making the most on Songs About You?
In my head, when I hear this question, I’m hearing ‘what song do you have the most fun making’ and I think it would be Perfectly Perfect and Your Smile Makes Me Smile. So the thing about both of them is that I had to mix light drums, which I had not done before making the records.
So after we were done with the songs, we needed them to just have an extra lift, because we could tell that these songs were going to be fantastic with drums. The issue was that I didn’t know how to program drums so I had to call one of my friends to play the drums, after which I started my YouTube learning journey again on how to properly mix drums.
How many musical instruments can you play?
I can only play the guitar. Every other thing you hear was made with a computer.
How has the feedback from fans on the project made you feel so far?
Super, super proud of myself and how far I have come. There’s this realization that people actually listen to my music that hits me every now and then and doesn’t ever stop blowing my mind. People reach out to me to say songs I made in my bedroom help them through challenging times. It makes everything worth it.
What does success look like for you in this game in the long run?
I think it would be when I can comfortably do this music without having to look over my shoulder, in the sense of having a back up plan. I simply want to make music. That is success.
Photos courtesy of Savy Henry
Editorial Assistance by Hadassah Olagoke-Daniel
Itty can be caught studying African pop culture, writing about it or hosting a relationship podcast. When he's not doing any of these, then he's definitely at a bar, getting mocktail.
