Samuel Edward Fakunle, who performs as Blizz, recorded “All Right” intending it to be his final release. He is a Nigerian Afrobeat singer, songwriter and producer based in the United Kingdom, and he had reached the point where he decided to step away from music. He did not stay away. In the years since, he has released more than 40 songs, and he produced most of them himself.
The reason he nearly stopped is specific. He describes the hardest moment of his career as the time he “did everything to properly become mainstream but didn’t have the right team and information.” He is not signed to a label, and plenty of independent artists will recognise the position, where the music is finished and the route to an audience is not. What kept him going was not the prospect of fame. He loves music whether or not it makes him famous, he says.
A song of his did about 10,000 plays in its first week on Apple Music, and people he did not know began to message him on social media. “I was really excited about that,” he says. For an artist who had been working without a team, strangers writing to him was proof that the songs were reaching someone.
He learnt to produce, mix and master his own songs during his National Youth Service Corps year so that he could carry on making music without waiting on anyone else, and he now trains young producers and supports young people through platforms such as YMCA. “All Right” was meant to close the story. It turned out to be the point where the story became a catalogue.
