Nigerian singer and songwriter Eniola Akinbo popularly known to many as Niyola has talked about a wide range of issues concerning herself in a fresh interview.
In an exclusive interaction with seasoned Nigerian journalist Chude Jideonwo, Niyola who has left relocated to Los Angeles, explained:
Living in a place like Nigeria, there are certain factors that would suppress you. Naturally you would be in a place and you would want to impress rather than express. So what you wanna say, you watch what you say because you don’t want to come off as a person who has a different opinion all the time, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But we live in a country where everybody thinks that everybody has to do the same things and these were things that affected me over time without me even realizing it. I think moving out of Nigeria did a great deal for me. I had always kind of lived between here and there, I was never really sat here but moving out of Nigeria helped me to see life from a very different lens. It helped me to see life from a different lens, a different way, and unlearn a lot of things that I learnt.
So I moved to L.A. I moved to L.A. primarily because I was sick, I’m not gonna lie, I was sick of being here. I felt like there was a ceiling over my head. I can’t get past this space. Like how do you grow in a place where you haven’t even discovered a quarter of yourself but it’s too much. How do I find the best version of myself if I cannot even be the best of me yet? I felt that I needed to get out and be in an open space and fly free. And that’s why I left. Coupled with the fact that obviously when my mum passed, I just needed to get away from everything.
So there was something that really really took my interest and I said I always wanted to do. I wanted to go back to school to study film scores. I love film scores. I could listen to film scores like the entire day, it doesn’t need to have words. Like watching a movie and being able to determine a certain mood or feel by creating sound that would determine what the mood of a particular scene of a movie is, it would intrigue me and I love watching animations a lot. When I would watch all these movies, I’ll be like ‘why can’t we do this?’ and I said I was going to go study that. But I didn’t want to go to Berkeley because Berkeley was in a cold area and I don’t like cold so I decided to move to L.A. So I moved to L.A. (Los Angeles) and it’s been great.
SOURCE: www.NaijaOnPoint.com
