In a candid new interview, the Grammy-winning Nigerian superstar reflects on who she was before music found her, and the emotional habits she had to quietly break to become who she is today.
The woman behind the records
Long before Tems became one of the most recognizable voices in global music, she was, by her own account, someone who kept the world at arm’s length. The 31-year-old Nigerian artist, born Temilade Openiyi, sat down with Doose Of Society for a recent interview that had very little to do with streaming numbers or award ceremonies. Instead, she turned the spotlight inward, describing a version of herself that many of her fans would barely recognize guarded, self-contained and emotionally unavailable, not out of coldness, but out of habit.
She described her pre-fame self as hyper-independent, someone who instinctively pushed people away before they could get close. It was not a character flaw she wore openly. It was simply the way she moved through the world, and for a long time, it worked. Then music arrived and changed the terms entirely.
What fame quietly demanded of her
Tems launched her career in 2018 with her debut single Mr Rebel, leaving behind a corporate job to take a chance on something she could not fully explain yet. The wider world caught up with her in 2020, when her feature on Wizkid’s Essence turned into a global phenomenon and introduced her voice to audiences far beyond Nigeria. What followed was one of the more rapid rises in recent music history. Collaborations with Drake, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and J. Cole came in quick succession. Two Grammy wins arrived. She became the first Nigerian artist to surpass 40 million monthly streams on Spotify a milestone that places her in company that very few African artists have ever reached.
But alongside the accolades came something quieter and more demanding. Fame, she explained, required her to grow in ways she had not anticipated. The discipline of being an artist of being known, of being seen pushed her to confront the habits that had long defined her relationships. Hyper-independence, she found, had a ceiling. So did the instinct to withdraw.
Learning to let love in
What makes Tems’ remarks in the Doose Of Society interview so compelling is not the confession itself, but the clarity with which she describes the shift. She is not speaking about a crisis or a breakdown. She is describing a gradual, deliberate unlearning the slow process of deciding that vulnerability is not a weakness to be managed but a quality to be embraced. She said she has learned to be open, to give love freely and to exist in that space without it feeling foreign or uncomfortable.
That is a meaningful evolution for any person. For someone whose emotional life is now inseparable from her public identity, it carries additional weight. The music Tems makes has always had an intimacy to it a quality of feeling like a confession rather than a performance. Her latest reflections suggest that the emotional honesty in her art has not only been a creative choice but a personal practice, something she has been working toward in real life at the same time.
A career defined by more than the scoreboard
What emerges from this interview is a portrait of an artist who understands that success changes a person from the inside out, not just in status or circumstance. Tems is not describing fame as a reward. She is describing it as a kind of pressure that exposed what needed to change and then gave her the motivation to change it. The result, she suggests, is a version of herself that is more open, more connected and more capable of the kind of love she once found difficult to express. For a global audience that already knows her voice, that is a reminder that the most interesting thing about Tems may still be the person she is becoming.
Source: El-Balad.com
