“Tonight” wasn’t so planned. I had just transferred to the United Kingdom from Covenant University
(Nigeria), and the songs that were popping back then were by Mr Eazi and Maleek Berry. They were
very chill Afrobeats-R&B type of songs. At one point, I had a break from school in 2015, and I came
back to Nigeria to see my parents, who really loved Africa Magic (TV station for mostly Nigerian
films). So, they were watching a movie, and in this Nollywood film, the girl just barges into the
room to find her guy cheating, and she’s screaming. She has a gun, and she’s shouting, “Johnny, how
could you do this?” And I was like, “Wait, this is a mad, dramatic introduction.” So, I just stepped
away because they were watching in the living room, and I set up my mic and started singing. I
started with the opener about my girl having a gun, and the whole song came from those lines. I
didn’t really think much of it at the time because I made the whole song in one night and uploaded
it the next day, but I remember the feeling after I uploaded it because Odusni (the Engine) tweeted
at me, and a lot of people were just messaging me that the song was special. The song came out in
2015. Apple Music or Spotify streaming wasn’t really a big deal in Nigeria. For me, the big one was
SoundCloud. I just recorded it and put it on SoundCloud. I didn’t think much of it because the songs
I was doing before weren’t going anywhere. It was just organically growing in 2016 because there was
no promotion or anything. Girls just blew the song up themselves. So, it was mostly girls doing
make-up, vlogs, Snapchat people, and all. I could tell that something was happening, which was very
cool, but by 2017, when the video came out, it was now like this is something crazy because that was
the year I did my first headline show in Nigeria, and people actually bought tickets to see me. I
could tell that the song had driven this wave because if someone is buying tickets to see you or
because of a song, you know that it's special. My parents came out; it was very special. Banky W
came, and even Wizkid was meant to pull up to the show. There were just so many things happening,
and it was just very fascinating to witness. I feel like people didn’t realise that I wasn’t an
artist. I was a student, and my parents were paying school fees, so I had to finish. After a few
months of being back in the UK, I would be in the library reading, and there would be Nigerians next
to me reading, and they would also be listening to “Tonight.” I could hear myself, and I would be
like, “What’s going on here?” They wouldn’t know that it was me, and I was sitting next to them. It
was after I graduated that I was able to pull resources together for the shoot. I remember that
right after the video dropped, things went crazy. It was on MTV, BET, and all those places. For me,
I didn’t understand the music industry because I had never really been a part of it like that.
