LADY DONLI DIDN’T GO ANYWHERE
Photography by Rhys Williams
Lady Donli is standing in front of me acting out Limp Bizkit’s notorious Woodstock 1999 performance. You know the one. Hot tarmac. Water shortages. Absolute carnage. Donli throws her arms in the air and lets out a prolonged, raspy breath to imitate the sound of a crowd humming in the distance. “That’s how crazy I want people to go when they hear my music,” she says. “I want people to leave like, ‘Wow, I really saw something today.’” Remembering a clip of lead singer Fred Durst enticing the crowd to violently dance, she reassures me: “Obviously, aside from the chaos of that festival, the energy in that performance is the kind of energy I want to transmit when I perform.”
The self-proclaimed pan-African rockstar Lady Donli was born in Ohio before moving to Abuja, Nigeria as a child, where she spent most of her days studying her eldest brother and his friends, who were musicians. Influenced by the likes of Chaka Khan and Fela Kuti, Donli has since firmly fixed her feet in Nigeria’s alté cruise music scene with the release of her debut track ‘Cash’ – a bouncy, soulful and manifestation anthem – from her debut album Enjoy Your Life in 2019. The 25-year-old quickly landed A COLORS SHOW performance off the back of ‘Cash’s’ success. When it came to matching that same reception on her next project, however, Donli hit a wall.
“I felt like I was on an upward trajectory after Enjoy Your Life and then after COVID that just came to a standstill,” she tells me, explaining that she felt stagnant after ‘Cash’ was received. “The past two years have been really hectic in terms of people's expectations of me,” she says. Donli worked with collaborators including London-based alt R&B musician Benji Flow, “Sad Girlz Luv Money” musician Amaraae and Nigerian singer-songwriter Tems on the album. At the time, Donli and Tems were known collaborators, but Donli quickly found herself being pitted against Tems after she struck gold and appeared on Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album and collaborated with Beyoncé, Future and Wizkid.
Self-comparison started setting in after Donli felt like her success was being measured against that of her peers. “I used to look at other people around me and see them progress in different ways and think: ‘What’s the issue with me?’” Despite the dissimilarity between Tems and Donli (the former makes R&B while the latter centres on afrobeat and soul), crucially, they are both women who emerged from the same scene, coincidentally, at the same time. The comparisons were almost inevitable.
“People were always like, ‘Oh man, what happened to Lady Donli?’” explains the musician. “They would be like ‘What’s she doing now….” After using the two years of lockdown for reflection, Donli learnt to appreciate that period of stagnation as a window for growth. “Now, I’ve learnt that comparisons can literally kill your joy,” she tells me. “So for me, I'm just happy for everyone and where that they are at. I’m now understanding that time is time.”
WILD, the title of Lady Donli’s second album, which stands for “Where Is Lady Donli”, is a cheeky jab at critics who proclaimed Donli “fell off” after ‘Cash’. The album marked her semi-vengeance and rebirth after some time away. The album itself is all about manifesting happiness. “I was just trying to manifest joy and prosperity for everyone,” she says. But, Donli soon realised that portrayal of happiness masked the reality of her emotions. “I was coming from a place where I wasn't in a happy space. Like, I was broke [when WILD released]. I was struggling, some things were going wrong. So I started creating the project as a way to manifest goodwill in my life.”
Deviating from the messaging in WILD, Donli now wants to lay bare her anxiety or self-doubt in her forthcoming album Pan African Rockstar. “It's kind of just showing vulnerability in like the idea of being a rock star. It's like people see you on stage in chaos, but then when you go off stage, you have these really vulnerable moments of self-doubt and just like, wondering if you're even good enough to present yourself to other people.” Donli hopes that the album will show her listeners that she, like most of us, experiences feelings of inadequacy, confusion or anxiety. “I want to show both sides of it, the self-doubt, and then the happiness. I think I’m leaning towards [making] music that’s just more honest about where I’m at in my life.”
The title of the upcoming album doubles up as Donli’s self-described moniker. “I call myself a pan-African rockstar because, I'm very proud of my heritage, as a Nigerian, African woman. And I'm very much a pan-African. It’s part of who I am; and the person I want to be.” As Donli has explored portraying her authentic self to her listeners, in that, she’s found herself fronting a band called Lady Donli and The Lagos Panic. When I ask her about the group, who have been playing together for more than a year, it’s at this point that Donli leaps from her chair and gives an energetic rendition of the Limp Bizkit performance. Every rockstar needs a band, after all. The Lagos Panic are a group of slick musicians, frequently seen donning Seventies inspired suits, under a name that apparently, according to Donli, “encapsulates the chaos of Lagos”.
Donli isn’t entirely comfortable with being the leading lady, though. “By the time we drop an album together, I want people to know that that's Richard on the guitar. That’s Praise on the drums and Day on the bass. And DJ Cam,” she says, praising her band members, who she repeatedly refers to as “family”. “I want everyone to know that they are capable of being the star of the show,” she says. “I never want to just be seeking success by myself.”