Tyla says she was nearly pushed into making “bubblegum pop” music.
In a new interview with Variety’s Thania Garcia, the 23-year-old singer described being overwhelmed by outside opinions and pressure to conform to a mainstream sound at the beginning of her career.
“When I got signed [at age 19], a lot of opinions came in, and it was a very overwhelming experience,” she told the magazine.
After trying out a number of different musical styles throughout numerous songwriting sessions, some of which tried to push her into a bubblegum-pop direction, Tyla said that those songs “didn’t feel like me at all” and called them “the most generic compositions you could ever think of.”
“I remember being in my hotel room and my managers were calling me, ‘Come down, we need to cut the song,’” she recalled. “I was crying and thinking, ‘This is not what I want. I didn’t get signed to do this. They had to [coax] me out of that room.”
However, Tyla found a turning point through that moment of resistance.
“I think through doing that, I realized how much more I love African music. It made me more persistent in keeping my ideas,” she noted.
She spoke about coming from a culture where questioning elders is taboo and women are expected to “stay out of men’s conversations, the men eat first,” but she ultimately fought to take control of her path—which later led to her breakout single “Water.”
“I think back to recording ‘Water,’ and I couldn’t have been more closed off to the outside world,” Tyla said of the session. “It was just me, my engineer and his pregnant wife in the studio. I used to be so shy.”
Ezekiel Lewis, president of Epic Records, told Variety, “Tyla’s first hit had to come from an African perspective — sonically rooted in Africa, but with the ability to travel globally. ‘Water’ was really the fulfillment of that vision. It confirmed what we believed: that she needed to launch her career with something authentic yet universally resonant.”
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