Celeste Ojatula and Her Time in the Sun

The call does not begin the way it was supposed to. There are two Google Meet links, an error on our part, and for a few minutes everyone is somewhere slightly different: Elizabeth is waiting in one, Celeste is waiting in the other, and Favour and I keep moving between them trying to land everybody in the same room. By the time we manage it, the apologies are already flowing, but Celeste, when we finally get to her, seems entirely unbothered. Her camera is off, and it will stay off for the whole hour.

Elizabeth Yakubu, Celeste’s manager, is mostly quiet throughout, keeping things moving in the background the way good managers do. The four of us talk for just over an hour across a connection that drops in and out the way Lagos connections tend to, and the picture of Celeste Ojatula that assembles itself through all that static is of a woman who grew up surrounded by sound, who taught herself to produce because nobody else could hear what she was hearing, who took a five-year break from music and came back to a sold-out show, and who has just released an EP she made almost entirely on her own terms.

She says she is looking for her people, and that she thinks they are everywhere.

I’m looking for my people. I want them to listen and think: this is the song I’ve been waiting for.

Her childhood did not contain much television. What it contained instead was music, and a great deal of it: her father’s highlife and Christian songs, her brother’s Luther Vandross and Anita Baker and Sade, her sisters’ Backstreet Boys and Westlife and Avril Lavigne, all of it circulating through a house where somebody was always putting something on. There was Tales by Moonlight in a neighbourhood still young enough that people gathered outside in the evenings, there were her grandmother’s Yoruba books, and there was a radio playing rock and storytelling and whatever else happened to be on.

She remembers songs from when she was two years old, so by the time she joined a choir, more out of boredom than any sense of calling, she was already carrying the kind of accumulated listening that eventually becomes a language of its own.

The choir frustrated her almost immediately, because they were always singing covers and she wanted to make original songs. She was writing her own by then, but she could not get them to sound the way she heard them in her head, and when a choir director told her she needed to learn an instrument, she did. Then she learned production, for exactly the same reason.

People just didn’t understand how I wanted the instrumentation to sound, and the feeling of that. So that’s how I started learning production.

— Celeste Ojatula

The logic is simple enough, and it recurs through everything she has done since: if nobody else can hear what she is hearing, she will go and learn how to build it herself.

Early in her career, Celeste reached out to Cobhams Asuquo about producing a song, and he sent back a price well beyond her reach. She laughed about it, and then went and learned to do the work herself. The song eventually came out; somebody who used to work with Cobhams heard it, loved it, and played it for him, and apparently he really liked it. She has run into him a handful of times since and has still not mentioned any of this, though she says she will eventually, when the moment is right.

This is roughly how she operates: quietly, patiently, with a very clear sense of what she is trying to make and an evident willingness to acquire whatever skill the making requires.

Her debut EP, Àló, which means tales, was co-produced. Our Time in the Sun, her second, released on 29 May this year, is primarily her own production, and the distance between those two records is really a story about what happens when somebody stops waiting for the right conditions and decides to build them instead.

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She is visibly happy talking about this EP. She uses the word “excited” more than once and none of it reads as performance, and when she explains the title she does it in a single breath that covers both the meaning and the feeling behind it.

It’s the first time that I am calling the shots. That’s why it’s Our Time in the Sun. It is beautiful when everything is bright and you’re having a good time.

— Celeste Ojatula

She describes herself as somebody who hates leaving things to chance; she likes to understand what a thing is, how to work around it, how to control it. Our Time in the Sun is a project she controlled, it sounds like a project she controlled, and she knows it does.

The collaborators came from her own orbit. Dwin the Stoic, a friend of roughly seven years, contributed to two tracks: on one of them she was overwhelmed with everything else going on and he essentially handled it himself, and on the other she simply handed him a microphone in her own house because he happened to be awake. He is direct and honest, she says, which makes the work straightforward. She also brought in Rafi, a producer and a colleague of hers at Sinclair, to add drums to “Oawa” after she had already built out the instrumentation herself.

The song called “Traveler” has a longer origin. She had been invited to a documentary project involving Luedji Luna, the Latin Grammy-winning Brazilian singer from Salvador, Bahia, built around the cross-cultural exchange between Yoruba-speaking communities in West Africa and communities in Bahia who also speak Yoruba, a connection that runs back through centuries. Luna spoke about what was possible in Brazil: government funding for artists, different stages available depending on where you were in your career. Celeste sat and listened and drifted.

I was literally daydreaming. This person was talking about all the possibilities, and here I was, an independent artist that has to fight for every single thing.

— Celeste Ojatula

What she was daydreaming about became the song, and the way she describes that imagined place is the most revealing thing she says all afternoon: somewhere everything is perfect, and you can only reach it by walking alone. She did not want it to live only in the audio either, so the animator who made the visuals for “Traveler” was asked to listen to the song first and have his own daydreams, and what he came back with shaped the video.

Anabel Rose, a pop artist who had been following Celeste since Àló, came in on the track, and she plays real flute on it. Celeste mentions this with the particular emphasis of someone who still slightly cannot believe it: that is a real flute. “New Memory” came out of a stretch in 2020 when she listened to so much house music that somebody assumed she was South African, and the DJ she brought in on it, whose approach to her own work she describes as intergalactic, added flute and extra instrumentation to balance things out. The title track was a dedication to lo-fi, which is what she puts on when she needs to focus or calm down.

When I ask how she would classify her own music she does not hesitate: alternative, and inside that, Afro folk, because the songs are always trying to tell you something. Then Afro-indie, soft rock, dream pop and deep house, which is where tracks like “Buntu” and “Traveler” sit.

On Afrobeats she is thoughtful rather than dismissive. She thinks it served a genuine purpose at a moment when people did not want to come home and sit through another slow story; they wanted to move, to get into a groove, to put their minds elsewhere, and there was serious marketing behind it besides. What she notices now is that the artists working in Afrobeats who people are actually talking about tend to be blending it with something else, which suggests the genre is evolving from the inside.

She also thinks the reason her own sound registers as different is not really that it is different. Everybody grew up listening to all of these sounds, she says; it is simply that at some point one genre received the funding and the marketing and became dominant. Now there is a shift back the other way, and people are returning to the music they were raised on.

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She performed at South by Southwest London this year, the festival’s second edition and her first time playing a physical international festival. A curator putting together a showcase called Afro Rising reached out and selected her as one of the African artists to bring over, and she says it made her feel her work was not simply floating in the void, that people had recognised it as a global sound worth carrying further.

The audience turned up early and engaged seriously. She was singing in a different language and a different tradition and they were having a good time regardless, and a number of them came to her listening event two days later, which happened to coincide with the official release of Our Time in the Sun. None of that timing was planned; she describes it as a manifestation of the EP itself.

What she talks about most, though, is the recording. In Nigeria she has done too many shows where they needed to capture the audio properly and something always went wrong, and that experience had hardened into a kind of low-level paranoia which she carried to London with her. Then everything simply worked: the sound was right, the recording was right, and she uses the phrase “smooth sailing” twice.

“None of it was planned. It all just happened. It felt like a manifestation of the EP itself: our time in the sun, literally.”

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She wakes up and has green tea, sometimes with honey. Then YouTube, where she watches recent things from artists she likes and takes notes on what she wants to apply to her own work, then guitar, because she constantly wants to be learning something new, and then production: adjusting textures, researching sounds, occasionally using Claude when she has had enough of YouTube. She is learning French. She is trying to get back into her workouts. She is reading Chimeka Garricks’s Tomorrow Died Yesterday and has not finished it because it is, she says, so vivid.

Three or four days a week go to other work, since she is not doing music full-time yet and says so plainly. The rest are music, learning, and the business side of things: planning a show, sending decks, having conversations with people. There is always that in between.

She tells me she can be very introverted, and later, when I mention that her camera has been off the whole time, she explains it without any embarrassment at all.

I’m a very shy person. I wouldn’t be able to keep my face on for the longest time. People will also be shy for me.

— Celeste Ojatula

You can hear the introversion in the careful answers and the pauses before she speaks, and you can also hear why none of it matters, because when she is talking about the music, about drifting off while Luedji Luna spoke, about the flute on “Traveler,” about the London crowd arriving early and staying, she sounds like precisely the person you would want in a room.

She has a show coming up in September and the planning is taking time, and she is making new music, which she is always doing.

The most rewarding part of the career so far, she says, is when people interpret what she is saying and arrive at the same imagery she had in her head when she wrote it, occupying the same space she was occupying. Beyond that there is the fact of the success itself, which she notes has been a long time coming: her first show after the break sold out, she can be somewhere now and people know who she is, and all of it still reminds her of how it felt when she was starting. That it has stayed constant seems to matter to her more than the scale of it.

Near the end I bring Elizabeth in and ask what it is like working with a creative like Celeste. The connection is breaking up badly by this point and it takes a few attempts to get through, but when she does she is brief and precise about it.

It’s always interesting to see how creatives work, how their brains work, and how they bring to life projects that previously existed in their heads.

— Elizabeth Yakubu, Celeste’s manager

The camera stays off. The call wraps up. Celeste says enjoy the rest of your day, and the line goes quiet.

She is looking for her people. I suspect they will find her.

I’m looking for my people. I think that we exist everywhere.