As he is highly recognised for his reggae music and has a sizable following in the Caribbean, Nigerian musician Timaya claims that most people don't know he is from Nigeria and believe him to be "from the Caribbean."
Inetimi Timaya Odon is Timaya's true name, and he hails from Baylesa State in the south of Nigeria. He shot to fame with his debut track, Dem Mama, in 2005, and his 2021 collaboration with rising Afrobeats star BNXN, Cold Outside, which received 75 million streams in just three months.
He claimed that Dem Mama was based on actual events, especially the way that army decimated his hometown and destroyed his grandmother's bakery: “I just had to use my voice. That's my way of contributing. The fact that it was a true story got the people's attention."
He said he mostly writes about painful life experiences: “You know I was born into a family of 15. It was hard there. I didn't see that kind of love growing up as a child so there was no love to preach about.”
He was the recipient of the 2017 Dancehall Act of the Year Afrima award. He appeared on Morgan Heritage's album Avrakedabra the next year, which earned him a Grammy nomination for best reggae album.
Timaya claims he has so many new songs that he simply needs to choose which ones to include in his upcoming album, which is set to be released later this year. He didn't want to share too much about his next project's collaborators, but he did say that Shaggy, a Jamaican-American singer, and Olamide, a Nigerian artist, are only two of the huge names who will appear.
