Nigerian singer, songwriter, and producer Tems has blown up in the mainstream music industry.
The song on which she features with Wizkid, Essence, was the song of the summer in 2020, and now she has just released her second EP If Orange Was A Place, which touches on peace, love, and emotional clarity.
Over the past few months, she’s been everywhere - from featuring on Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album to performing on the Jimmy Kimmel Show and being Apple’s latest Up Next artist.
Tems is flying right now but there’s an interesting backstory as to how she started. Here are 5 things to to know about the singer:
Tems is known for her unique voice. Deep and velvety, it has an almost androgenous quality. Because of this, she wasn’t sure she had what it took to sing professionally. In an interview with The Fader, she said she thought her voice was “too heavy.”
Before her music career took off, Tems was building a career for herself in marketing. Like many creatively gifted kids, her family thought this was a ‘safer’ career choice. She also obtained two degrees before starting out in the corporate world.
Around the age of 15, Tems decided to stop listening to other music artists in order to find her own unique sound. Although she wasn’t sure what she wanted to sound like, what she did know is that she didn’t want to sound “fake”. “I wanted to learn how to attack a song from what I was feeling, not what Beyoncé would do or anyone else.”
After struggling to find music producers to work with, she decided to learn music production herself. She started watching YouTube videos to learn the ropes and got into it pretty quickly. Since she knows exactly what she wants a song to sound like, it gave her extra level of creative control.
When Barack Obama released his favourite music of 2020 list, Essence was a featured track - alongside Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage, Travis Scott’s Franchise and Internet Money’s Lemonade.
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