“Leaving EME wasn’t a happy ending, but it also wasn’t a sad one” — Eniola ‘Niyola’ Akinbo
My guest today is the star of the new Netflix Original, Swallow.
Talking about everything from leaving EME record label, and losing her parents, to leaving Nigeria. Niyola tells me what years in the wilderness have taught her…and why, today, she feels reborn.
Niyola shares how She lost the three most important persons in her life!
“A lot of things happened. It was pain, it was a loss, it was gain.
“I lost very important people in my life, three of them. I lost my friend. I lost my friend, a very close friend of mine, I lost my mom and I lost my dad. And I don’t mean this the wrong way but I have to say it, because if I’m sharing my story, I have to be honest, I think moving out of Nigeria did a great deal for me.
“I’ve always kind of moved between here and there, I was never really settled. But moving out of Nigeria helped me to see life from a very different lens. It helped me to see life from a different place, a different way and to unlearn a lot of things that I had learnt here and also learnt and decided if they were really who I wanted to be or who I was programmed to be.
“There’s that, and there’s the game. I lost my mom and all of a sudden it felt as if scales fell off my eyes and I could see. So the time that my mum was ill, and at the hospital at Ikeji, I would go there every day. I didn’t even have the time of day to make my hair, to fix my nails or to just do all these things that we females feel we need to do. They’re great but I felt they were hard to do like going to the store, I couldn’t just go down there with my hair.
“I didn’t have the time, my mum was lying there fighting for her life.”
How She feels about leaving EME Record Label!
There was the issue of looking the way that I looked. So, there was an expectation of how I should look to sell music. Naturally, when a female artiste wants to do music, the first thing anybody will think of especially as a business man will be “Be sexy”. “It was a great time being in EME, I’m not going to lie but I want to believe that it served its purpose. I was saying to someone yesterday that, not everybody is meant to, in the Nigerian term ‘blow’.
“If you’re supposed to appeal to a hundred people, if your circle of influence is within ten people, you will not exceed that, but if your influence is supposed to impact these ten people, then that’s what you should focus on.
“It’s not everybody that’s meant to appeal to everybody. And so, I feel like being on EME helped me to realize that.
“Because everything I didn’t do at EME has helped me to know what I should be doing. It wasn’t a happy ending, it also wasn’t a sad ending.”
❤️
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1 Comment
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