Adedamola Adefolahan, better known as Fireboy DML is one of the most influential Nigerian artistes at the moment. The RnB singer who is signed to Olamide’s YBNL said reading was always that escape for him.
Speaking in a chat with Afrobeat Intelligence, he said: “I read a lot, wrote a lot. I struggled as a kid with a lot of things so reading was always that escape for me. Until I found out I could sing, and I was like ‘okay I can sing, okay fine.’ But then I didn’t really think about going into music until when I was 17, my second year in school, in uni. And then I made my first song and confirmed to myself that, ‘omo you can sing o. I think this is what you want to do for the rest of your life.’ Because from that point, I was blinded by purpose. School, everything else, music. But before that, I was always being the art guy, the reading guy, the writing guy. The ‘write-love-letter’ guy.
“Wow. I think that’s what laid the foundation for me since 2017. I knew that if I fused that part of myself in my art. It’s not every time you find that popstar that has a nerd vibe. It was a deliberate thing. Add some difference to your stuff. Let people say, ‘this guy is not the regular superstar.”.
Speaking further, the ‘Jealous’ crooner stated that most of the things he learnt were picked up from his secondary school experience.
“I grew up in Abeokuta Ogun state, regular family; dad, mum, three kids. I’m the firstborn of three boys. I’ve always had that sense of responsibility, even though I was one of the most irresponsible kids out there. But lowkey, I had that sense of responsibility since I was a kid. We didn’t really go out much, we were one of those “omo get inside” people. My parents didn’t even want me to learn the Yoruba language. I had to learn on the streets and by streets, I meant in school. I attended a public secondary school, so I was exposed to a lot of things. Most of the things I learnt, was from there. Language, street lingua, all those stuff I infuse in my songs. The Yoruba I put in my songs, I learned from there. That was the only chance that I had to get exposed and be influenced by society. I wasn’t really going out that much at home. My dad didn’t really give us the freedom to go out, visit friends and stuff like that. I grew up the homeboy that only got exposed in school, until I got to university”.