Singer needs to be more selfish with her music

For all you fanboys of the petite and sultry Simi, you just might have to wait longer for her album which she has decided to move to 2017. Yes, you heard that right. Simi isn’t dropping album for you guys this year.

According to the singer, there’s just not enough left in her tank to properly follow the work, mix and master it. Or if she gives it out to someone else to handle, her involvement in the resultant process will be huge. Simply, put she can’t help herself not to be too involved in her personal work.

“I am working towards releasing my album and hopefully, we would release it soon. I was hoping to release it this year but I don’t really know if it is still feasible."

"I don’t know if I would have the mental energy to mix and master the album. Because I am a perfectionist, I don’t know if anyone would want to do it because I would be contributing at every step of the production.", she told Punch.

For many of you who haven’t seen behind the scenes, Simi isn’t all vocals, pretty face and an attitude. She’s a sound engineer, who has been responsible for the mixing and mastering of a huge amount of music that you have heard from Nigeria. This year alone, she worked on sound quality on the raving Adekunle Gold’s eponymous album, which according to reviews and critical reception, has one of the best sonic arrangements that Nigeria has experienced this year.

A good look through her social media pages, (especially Snapchat), will reveal that she spends most of her time recording new material, supervising the recording of other people’s material, or crouching over a computer at some desk, or on her famous bed (which always has a white bedsheet). She’s always mixing, mastering, chopping, joining, listening, sampling, and editing new music at every point. There are also reports that she has found time to also eat, sleep, tweet, post photos on Instagram, make jokes on her friends and family, pout, blow kisses and use the bathroom. How stressful.

But then, with numerous demands on her time, it’s a struggle for her to come up with her album. Simi relaunched herself into the music industry via X3M Music in 2014 with ‘E no go funny’ and ‘Tiff’. The latter later received wide acceptance and set her up for ‘Jamb Question’, it’s remix with Falz, ‘Open and close’, and ‘Love don’t care’. She has embraced the industry, made niche sounds, branded exquisitely, and grown organically. The time is right for her to mark this time with the release of her debut project.

A Simi album will offer the singer a chance to package all her brilliance into one solid body of work, and show the world an extended range of her powers. That’s what Simi needs right now. She has toiled enough with singles and collaborations with her friends. She needs her personal project to make the transition from ‘the lady who has a great voice, and sings good music’, to the lady who has a body of work, and tours seriously based on her full body of work’.

If a solo Simi studio album does not show up this year, there are plans for an EP to appear. Only this time, her chemistry with rapper Falz will be explored and made into more art. The project is aptly titled “Chemistry”, and at the moment, all things equal, it will be released before the end of 2016.

That’s good news for fans, but Simi needs more than a series of collaborations to properly consolidate her gains so far. She needs to show some more selfishness.