Doyinsolami, an up-and-coming singer, who prefers to go by the name Doyinsola, has said she is in love with herself. She made the declaration in a recent interview with TheNiche.
“I just love everything about me and the fact that I am always me. I am in love with myself,” she said, while responding to the question on what she loves about herself.
Ask her why the preference for Doyinsola, and the response is that “people find it hard pronouncing Doyinsolami”, which is the name her civil servant father and pastor mother gave her at birth. Interestingly, it was her parents, who, breaking from the norm of parents not wanting their children to go into music, paid her to fly to Abuja and participate in the 2007 Star Quest music competition.
Anyone who saw her awesome performance at the recent re-launch of Labule in Lagos will agree that it was a good decision by her parents to let her go into music. They must have known that the economics graduate of Bowen University has it in her. She, after all, grew up listening to Mary J. Blige, Westlife, Marc Anthony and a host of others.
“I look up to the likes of 2face Idibia whose music have message,” she said.
Perhaps she was the only one who saw music as something she could do on the side.
“I never chose music. I knew I could sing, but maybe something I could do just for leisure and not take it as a career; although, I was on Star Quest in 2007. Then I was still in school. My brother always told me, a person’s talent would make a way and I insisted I wanted to work. After lots of talk and push, I decided to go into the studio again and we made ‘Bamidele’,” she said.
‘Bamidele’ is one of the songs she performed at the Labule event. The song is her second single and, for now, she said, she just wants to release a couple of singles before the album.
So what would she be doing if not music?
“I would probably be working in a corporate organisation or doing fashion designing at the same time. That’s another side of me people don’t know about and I wish to develop that too later on,” she told TheNiche.
Right now, she emphasised, it’s just music, “music all the way”. And this is not just because it gives her so much joy, but also because people appreciate her songs, hence they sing and dance to them.
Her father is her hero; any day, any time, she asserted.
About Nigerian music as it is today, she said, “I think we have really improved and we are getting better by the day. It’s amazing how fast we have grown.”
The three shows where she has performed are very interesting for her. “My performance at Star Trek Lagos, the crowd was something else; Glo Laffta Fest at Ikeja, amazing audience, and Labule show, which felt like home,” she said.
