Taken from the autumn 2024 issue of Dazed. Get your copy here.
Ayra Starr has been living life in reverse. The Nigerian musician has headlined a world tour, earned a Grammy nomination and performed on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage at the age of 22. But she is still green to many of the pleasures your ordinary 20-something might enjoy.
“I’ve always been an adult,” she says of her teenage years spent mostly looking after her siblings or working. It was only last year that she went on her first holiday. On a birthday trip to Barbados, Starr was able to let herself unclench and soak in her accomplishments under the soothing blues of a clear sky. It was then, for the first time, that she started to write about her life.
Starr had never done that in a song before. A natural griot, she instead filled her debut album, 19 & Dangerous, with stories from the world around her. “[I would write about] everything from life to TV shows. My friends would tell me ‘Ohh, my boyfriend did this’ and I’d be like, ‘That would make a good song,’” she laughs. “I would just watch people. I was a viewer, and I loved to listen.” It’s a formula she rode to phenomenal success, racking up half a billion streams on Spotify and, with the single “Bloody Samaritan”, becoming the first female artist to top the Nigerian charts with a solo track. But when it came to writing the follow-up, May’s sun-kissed and poppy The Year I Turned 21, she hit a creative wall.
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“You have to have things to write about, and I didn’t have that for two years because I was on tour and on the road for weeks and weeks,” says Starr. “I didn’t see my family. I had friends but I didn’t really have friends like that anymore because I was working all the time. There were no boys to write about. There was nothing.” Beyond all that, she felt a deeper barrier. “I realised that I couldn’t write about myself. I’m used to writing about people’s experiences... it takes a lot of vulnerability to write about yourself.” The realisation that she had walls up so high that even she couldn’t see over them concerned her.
On her recent trip to Barbados, she received a song as a gift from her friend, Leon Thomas III, a songwriter and former child actor who co-starred with Ariana Grande in Victorious. It was named “21”, the age Starr was turning. They had spent a month together in the studio and traded life stories. “I didn’t know he was taking notes,” she says, smiling. “It made me see myself. I remember crying when I heard it. I recorded it, changed parts and made it my own... After that song, I understood everything I was making.”
“The secret to music is that it’s universal. It’s never about the language. Language is important, but when good music is good music, you can’t run away from it” – Ayra Starr
It was a breakthrough. Another song that would make it on to the album, “1942”, finds Starr staring even deeper into the mirror, singing: “My first time scratching past the surface / Make me realise / I don’t wanna lose / Scared that maybe one day I might lose it all.” It was the seed of an album that came together conceptually after a session with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin. “I explained to him that I had all these songs, but they didn’t make sense as a body of work. He gave me this book by [13th-century Persian poet] Rumi, and drew a diagram for me on the first page. ‘Write the theme of the album. You see all the blank space around it? Make sure you write songs that fit.’” In the middle, he had written ‘21’. “The way he explained it was so beautiful. I was like, ‘Oh, that isn’t even that hard. I just need to know my vision. If I have it on paper, I know what I’m trying to do.’”
Released to acclaim two weeks before her 22nd birthday – with features from the likes of Asake, Coco Jones and Rauw Alejandro – the album went to number one in her homeland and has, in a little over two months, amassed 500m streams on Spotify. Beyond the figures, the LP represents an internal shift in Starr: “Twenty-one is when I started to live more for myself and understand myself more.”
While the singer is chatty, warm and easy to talk to, she can also seem slightly guarded at times. She speaks with her camera off on Zoom, suggesting that we switch to a video call the following day, after hair and make-up is applied for her cover-story shoot. Perfectionism, she says, almost prevented her getting signed to the label of her dreams, Mavin Records, who have developed and signed the likes of Rema, Ladipoe and Tiwa Savage. Back when she had about 5,000 followers on Instagram and four covers of songs posted, she filmed herself singing her first original track. Umming and ahhing, she went back and forth about whether she should share it online. “I was thinking, ‘I don’t like the way I look,’” she explains. “My neck looked kind of weird; I had veins [because] I was, like, straining my voice. I even made the video black and white.” Her aunt insisted that she post it.
Starr uploaded the clip and made a point of ignor- ing her phone – “I didn’t want to touch it because I was embarrassed” – but when she came back to it some four hours later, she had received a message from Mavin CEO Don Jazzy. “‘I love this video, come to the studio,’” she recalls him saying, the thrill of the moment still percolating in her voice. “It had always been my dream to get signed to Mavin because that’s the best and the biggest record label: when they sign you it means you are going to be a star – it’s a no-brainer. They’ll work on you. They’ll build you up. You know how K-pop groups are?”
A stranger with no connection to either Starr or Don Jazzy had sent the clip to him, and has become a close friend of Starr’s since. As the singer recalls the moment, her phone rings – it’s the Instagram matchmaker. It’s moments of cosmic serendipity like these that have peppered Starr’s rise, she says. Her onstage moniker is ‘Celestial Being’, a name that came to Starr in a moment of instinct. “It’s something I’m embodying. I feel like maybe after an album in, like, five years, I’ll be almost in my final form and it will make sense,” she says, “I have so many meanings for it, but I don’t think I’m ready to share them until I’m sure.”
“I’ve never lived outside of Africa, so I’ve always been proud of my culture. There were no external forces: I wanted to be an African superstar.” – Ayra Starr
The album’s love stories, which hinge on fictitious details and characters, come from a real place of yearning, she tells me: “I want to fall in love. I wrote ‘Lagos Love Story’ about what love would look like if I was.” Although she says she is single and has never been in a relationship herself, she’s a self-professed “lover girl deep in my heart, I’m just very strong-head- ed about it. I actually have never been in love... I’ve been in certain situations – not situationships! – but I’ve never been in a fully committed relationship.”
“I’ve put myself out there and I’ve tried to see what’s there,” Starr continues, “but I don’t think I’ve had the time – I’ve always been working. I’ve been working since I was 15: I was modelling, I was doing university, and now I’m on the road.” Still, it hasn’t stopped her from browsing. She cackles talking about the clips that have gone viral of her picking men in the crowd to sing to, dance for or flirt with: “It’s me just enjoying myself as a girl. I’m like, let me sing to a cute boy today and I’m looking around because I can – why not?”
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Born in Cotonou, Benin, Starr was young when her parents first split. (“They were always separat- ed, back together, separated, but they were never divorced.”) She lived between Benin, Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria, attending five different secondary schools. In her beautician mother’s household, she lived with her aunt and older sister – “three strong women” – while in her businessman father’s home, she took on a maternal role. “I’ve always been in charge of my siblings because I’m African and I’m a woman... As long as you’re a girl, you’re in charge of everybody, so even as a middle child I was in charge,” she says. “I had to cook before school, and before classes, and I had to be back home so that everybody [could] eat when I was back.”
Her domestic obligations meant that Starr found it hard to enjoy her success at first. “I don’t know how to be happy without feeling a bit of guilt,” says the singer, who calls her family constantly while out on tour. “I’m just like, Are they good? Shall I call them? Are you guys OK? [And they’ll be like], everyone’s fine, just enjoy yourself for one moment! Be happy! I’m used to working, working, working and I need work to feel validated. I was noticing all these things about myself and it was making me depressed.”
Growing up, Starr found the process of grieving the loss of her father a great and lengthy upheaval. “I miss him and all of the things that could have been and things I could have shared,” she admits. “He’d be doing parties all day for everything... That’s what he was known for – [for] having a good time.” She ends the album with an ode to him. It gushed out, along with a lot of tears. Written just days before the record was due to come out, the song includes voice notes from her whole family and “cheeky” lyrics, because, she says, “he had a great sense of humour... We all have our ways of coping with grief, and I feel like that was my way.”
Less than a week after our interview, Instagram stories circulate of Starr in Barbados again, this time twerking with Rihanna (a fan of hers) at Crop Over festival dressed in bejewelled and feathered, barely-there costumes, both designed by local costumier and serial RiRi collaborator Lauren Austin. It was a beautiful, cross-cultural diasporic celebration from two international superstars who always represent their roots. “I’ve been on a lot of genres, but I’ve brought the Afrobeat to them... I know how to bring my culture to every single thing I’m in,” says Starr. “I’ve never lived outside of Africa, so I’ve always been proud of my culture. There were no external forces: I wanted to be an African superstar.”
Not long ago, Starr’s labelmate Rema protested the ‘watering down’ of Afrobeats through artists merging aspects of the sound with more palatable genres like pop and house. Unsurprisingly, Starr agrees. “It’s very important for me to highlight my culture,” she says. “People tell me I can tap into this market by singing more in English [but] I’m like, I’m not going to dilute my culture. This is my identity,” she says, firmly. “People listen to Spanish and all types of music, what makes the African one so bad? Why don’t we love ourselves? Why don’t we see how beautiful our culture is?”
“The secret to music is that it’s universal,” says Starr as she reflects on her journey so far. It makes me think about the pidgin verses she frequently matches with trap beats – an ode to her motherland, and her genre-fluid approach to art. “It’s never about the language,” she says. “Language is important, but when good music is good music, you can’t run away from it.”
Hair KEESHA COOMBS, make-up LAKE SANU, nails LESLY ARRAÑAGA, set design JAMES RENE at JONES MANAGEMENT, photographic assistants BONO MELENDREZ, IRENE TANG, styling assistant KAMERON KUBICKI, set design assistant RYAN ELLIOTT, digital technician DANIEL PRIMERO, production GOOD THINGS TEK TIME, production coordinator KIM ROMERO, production assistant ALEX TENNISON
The summer 2024 issue of Dazed is out internationally on September 12