Lindsey Abudei, born and raised in Jos, Nigeria, is a contemporary and genre-bending singer-songwriter. Working within an intuitively authentic and explorative framework, Abudei's creative being is underpinned by R&B, rock, blues, and jazz. The simple sights and sounds of nature that saturate her surroundings further inform her practice; a vision of a full moon through a window is enough to spark Abudei's ingenuity.
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Creative Origins
A songstress who lives and breathes music, Abudei's audio inclinations were nurtured from a very young age. "My first interest in music came from my family. My parents, they really loved music, and they had a diverse collection of music that played a part in how we were raised. We woke up almost every morning, and there was music playing", she shares. The music that soundtracked Abudei's upbringing was highly influenced by the soundscape of her father's youth, which he spent curating as a disc jockey at university and during his time spent living in the UK. She also grew up with a mother who sang in a choir and a grandfather who owned and played the grand piano.
Abudei parallels her experience growing up in Jos to that of New Orleans and Nashville, identifying the similar view of music as a communal and recreational activity taken on not only by professional musicians but by the average member of society. She says, "You just find random people who might not be professional musicians but they play music, they play an instrument. The weekends we'd often spend at hangouts, barbecues, jam sessions, and none of it was professional. It was just part of the social scene."
From law graduate to full-time musician
"I didn't know I was going to be a musician until I got into university, funny enough. I knew I loved music, I loved curating music, but I didn't know if I was good enough at it. It wasn't even a 'career' in the first place. It wasn't something I thought about." Abudei completed her undergraduate degree in Law at the University of Jos. During her first year, a friend invited her to a weekly weekend session called Brainstorm: a gathering of young people, hosted by pastor Bola Adebisi, who would meet up for bible study and jam sessions. She describes the environment of Brainstorm sessions as a space that "didn't make it feel like you were in church" and one that offered safety and freedom to talk about anything.
Abudei experienced a powerful moment during one of the Brainstorm jam sessions, a moment of realisation that music was not simply something that she enjoyed listening to or creating but something that she felt deeply inclined to explore at a professional performance level. As she describes it, "I was made to sing, so I picked up the microphone, and that was it. When I picked up that microphone and sang into it, I felt different. It was as if I unlocked a part of myself I didn't know was there before, and I was like, 'no, I have to get to the root of this. I have to explore it'. And I'm still here exploring it."
As she continued her studies, Abudei started jamming and collaborating with brothers MI Abaga and Jesse Jagz, lending her vocals to a number of their tracks. She was also a backup singer for South African singer Sonti Mndebele and spent some time as the lead vocalist of a local Jazz quintet called The Jazzcats. After graduating with her law degree, Abudei moved from Jos to Abuja, Nigeria and decided to pursue a full-time career in music, despite her parents' opinion that she should follow the path to becoming a lawyer. She shares her feelings on practising Law: "I felt that if I was going to do it, it wasn't something that I was going to just do haphazardly. There's a sacredness and sanctity to Law; that's the way I see it. I felt like I wasn't in the position, at that time, to take on that responsibility."
Brown (EP, 2013)
Upon moving to Abuja, Abudei spent a year working at a record label called Chocolate City and joined the Guild of Artists and Poets (GAP), a collective that would meet every Sunday to discuss the social, personal, and political happenings of the week, as well as perform music and poetry in all their forms. This provided Abudei with a community of artists in the city, allowing her to perform more regularly. This grounding birthed the release of her first song, "Drift Away", in 2013.
Soon after "Drift Away", Abudei released two more songs, followed by a debut EP, Brown, produced in collaboration with composer and recording artist Atta Otigba, whom she had met while working as a singer in the piano lobby at the Sheraton Hotel, Abuja. When asked about her songwriting process, Abudei speaks about finding inspiration in thoughts, feelings, questions, and conversations. She finds the creative process cathartic, differentiating between songs that are written from a place of pensive thought and those that are written from raw emotion. Abudei enjoys creating scenarios influenced by the experiences she'd had, along with those around her. She finds her creativity ignited by the stories that unfold around her and the ways in which she can relay those stories through her own artistic lens.
Despite expressing that she sometimes cringes when listening back to Brown, she maintains that the project was a pivotal moment in her development as a musician, "I appreciate that it was of that time, it's part of my story. There was really no set way or theme for the project. I was just tired of people saying, 'oh yeah, the Lindsey from this project or that project'. I wanted to have something that was mine, so Brown came out of that as well. It was more like 'we're in the desert, we're looking for water… just aaaaaah, let it all out." In the year of its release, 2013, Abudei submitted her EP to Radio France Internationale (RFI) and won a Prix Découvertes Award. On the achievement, she shares, "I was queasy about sending it because it was my first project, but I sent it anyway, and I was second runner-up, so I got an award! That's what made me think, 'Ah, I can do this. There are more places I can explore with my music, not just Nigeria.' So that's pretty much what opened my door."
…And The Bass Is Queen. (Album, 2016) and beyond
Abudei's next big project was her debut album, which she created in collaboration with Atta Otigba, the same producer she worked with for Brown. "...And The Bass Is Queen. became 'Okay, so we've done Brown, we've let that out, and we need to now decide what this project is.' I'd been playing with ideas for the title, and I actually had the title before I had the project. It was just a line I came up with, and I kept saying it. I kept saying it for two years before I actually started recording the project." With the title settled came the hard part — writing the songs. Abudei described her writing process as one that was completely different to Brown, as she took on a more calculated approach rather than the freestyle-esque structure of her first project. The inclusion of the bass, both instrumentally and through frequency, took precedence in the creation of …And The Bass Is Queen. "Imagining the song as it is, without the bass, it sounds terrible. It just sounds like a lot of chirping. There's no depth or grounding", Abudei considers. Her debut album also channelled a deliberate sense of control, as evidenced by her vocalisation. She shares, "I thought of the queen on the chessboard and imagined how she moves on the board. There's no rule, no set way that she has to move; she can move any way she wants."
Abudei subverts and deconstructs traditional instrumentation, which typically aims to harmonise frequencies, by amplifying bass tones and focusing her composition on deeper frequencies. In doing so, her music manages to reflect her personal ethos of creative rebellion. She spoke more about this in a 2017 TED Talk, "Defying the Construct", which was delivered at Port Harcourt shortly after the release of her first studio album. "Why are you leaving law to do music? Isn't music just a hobby? Is law not supposed to be the "job"? The one that is supposedly respectable?" she talks on stage as she quotes her father's response to her decision to pursue music as a career instead of the more traditional and respectable field of law. Abudei strives to make the arts more accessible to those who want to engage beyond a "hobby" in Nigeria, and in doing so, she analyses notions of job respectability in her culture.
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With the momentum of …And The Bass Is Queen., Abudei became an Art Omi Music Fellow in 2017 and completed her first international artist residency. She says, "It's one of my fondest [residencies] because it was my first. I remember feeling inadequate when I got there on the first day because some of my fellow residents were people who had PhDs in different music fields. I was like, 'what am I doing here?' By the second day, I just said, 'Ah, it is my work that got me here. I'm not in the wrong place. If I wasn't meant to be here, I wouldn't be.'" The sense of community and confidence fostered at Art Omi propelled Abudei to apply for and participate in the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music (2018) and the Red Bull Music Academy (2018). "The funny thing is, at the time, most people were like, 'Oh, Lindsey, you're on a roll!', but they didn't know how many rejections I was sitting on. For everyone I got, I probably got 20 rejections." Residencies played an integral role in Abudei's musical development as they allowed her to work with a wide range of musicians from different backgrounds, such as traditional Arabic instrumentalists, classical composers and music psychologists. This led her to create, compose and perform in a new and nurturing environment to explore a variety of methodologies, instruments and influences, sometimes even in collaboration with fellow residents.
Abudei is still expanding and honing her skills and broadening the scope of her musical output with every project that comes. Most recently, she has been exploring vocal looping and arrangement and using her voice to create harmonious soundscapes that are often inspired by and paired with scenes from her environment, typically through sunsets, greens and shorelines. By publicly documenting her process on Instagram, she invites us into her creative world, witnessing the beauty and simplicity of nature through her eyes and ears.
Abụ Ya
The singer's latest song, "ABỤ YA (HER SONG)", pays tribute to Abudei's grandmother, and is beautifully sung in her native language, Igbo. It was featured on the recent album Yellow by fellow Nigerian singer-songwriter Brymo.
Check out Abudei's blog for more of her inner musings.