Q&A: Transcontinental Talent With Omietté
MOST PEOPLE MOVE TO LOS ANGELES — and never leave. It’s understandable, with all the creative enclaves, commercial appeal, and melting pot sensibilities. The city might have everything someone in music might need, but sometimes home is really where you get to be yourself. For Afrobeat prodigy Omietté, his homeland of Nigeria is where his real artistic expression awakens.
Omietté makes his grand debut in digital streaming with “FRESH,” a wavy entrance dripping with lush confidence. The ambiance of the record conveys polish and savvy, from the leading guitar and the tasteful autotune to the fish-eye fit check on the track’s cover art.
In the song, Omietté arrives a tinge too late to the party, but the powerful backing vocals mean he’s in the right for it.
The Nigerian-born, LA-based artist, actor, and model is calm, collected, and has a fantastic demeanor to boot. He was kind enough to let Luna interview him for his debut single, “FRESH.” Read the interview below.
LUNA: Thanks for joining us. What have you been up to?
OMIETTÉ: I’ve been mostly doing acting right now. I’ve diverted my attention to music a little bit more since I’m gearing up to release “FRESH.” I’m also planning on going to Nigeria next month.
LUNA: Interesting — what’s on the itinerary?
OMIETTÉ: I make some music in my home studio but I tend to make most of it with my production team back home in Nigeria. I usually come up with song ideas and melodies based on YouTube beats and then we build a new beat around that idea. That’s the majority of what I’ll be doing back home.
LUNA: Majority? What else have you got planned?
OMIETTÉ: I have a friend named Yung Willis who became a big producer in Nigeria, so I’m going to try to work with him. I also wanted to visit some radio stations and make some music connections out there.
LUNA: You said you grew up in Nigeria. Can you tell me more about that and how you got to LA?
OMIETTÉ: I was born in a city called Port Harcourt. I stayed there until I was about seven, when my dad got a job in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. We stayed there until I was 16 and we moved to Houston.
LUNA: What prompted the move to Houston?
OMIETTÉ: At the time, Ebola was a big thing. There was also a lot of terrorism going on by a group called Boko Haram. My dad is very protective of his family so he got us out of there.
We initially tried to move to England because I got accepted into a school there, but my siblings didn’t and didn’t want to go without them. Two years before we moved to Houston, we visited on vacation and stayed with a family friend. The weather was pretty similar, and there were a lot of other Nigerians around so it wouldn’t feel too far from home. It just made sense.
LUNA: I see. What were some good parts about living in Nigeria?
OMIETTÉ: Living there started my interest in music. My dad is big into writing — poems, stories, some songs. And my mom is the most religious person I’ve ever met, so I grew up around a lot of African gospel songs. It wasn’t necessarily my favorite but my uncle always had the radio playing when he worked out. I was there all the time and eventually heard Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” for the first time. It changed my whole life.
LUNA: How so?
OMIETTÉ: I went back home and found a music channel for the first time. I stood in front of it all day listening to Wayne, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and Ja Rule.
LUNA: Is that what made you pursue music?
OMIETTÉ: I had the inkling for music, but I wasn’t as bold as to pursue it. My little brother, on the other hand, is one of the most talented soccer players I’ve ever met. He ended up not pursuing it because he got really sick and couldn’t keep it going. He suggested that I tried it and it kept following me wherever I went, everybody made music. I needed to start so I bought this ginormous notepad and just wrote lyrics all day.
LUNA: How did we arrive at “FRESH” when you had all this hip-hop around you?
OMIETTÉ: I used to be a big hip-hop guy, and I’ve been lucky enough to open up for A Boogie [Wit da Hoodie] at one point. I didn’t really feel like it was necessarily true to my culture. I’m African, not African American. I switched to Afrobeats after I moved to LA, but I didn’t really have a full understanding of the genre — current slang and stuff like that.
LUNA: I assume there’d be a learning curve to fully understand a new genre, but it sounds like your new song is a big step in that direction.
OMIETTÉ: When I first tried to make Afrobeat songs, they came out okay. I look at “FRESH” and I think it’s going to have a big impact. When I perform it live, it always gets the biggest reception.
LUNA: Let’s talk more about “FRESH” and its creative process.
OMIETTÉ: It was during my trip to Nigeria in April 2022. We made about 20 songs and we recorded a documentary for it too. But I typically walked into the sessions overdressed and everybody else pulled up wearing whatever. One of the producers asked me about it and suggested we should make a song based on it.
We started with a guitar riff and the main melody. The demo took us about six hours and we just added/subtracted over the course of a year. The big backing vocals really gained my confidence in the song. It catches people’s attention and that’s a big part of Nigerian or African music — that collectiveness. I like to include those big background vocals in my music as much as possible.
