ASA, A Paris-born Nigerian songwriter, sees her music as a force for good and doesn't shy away from dark themes as wide-ranging as blood diamonds, war and paedophilia, writes Siobhan Long.
Looking askance at the world is what just might set Asa apart. Her Parisian beginnings and Nigerian upbringing have conspired to set her apart from the rat-a-tat-tat repetitiousness of much of what clogs the airwaves these days.
Not having been schooled in the finer points of One Tree Hill or America's Top Model, Asa writes with a stark simplicity and sings as if imbuing every lyric with a wide-eyed guilelessness is what she was put on this planet to do.
A self-confessed outsider, Asa makes no secret of the fact that it was an intractable sense of isolation that drove her towards music, and singing in particular.
"I think a lot of people thought I was weird or different," she says, on the phone from the rehearsal studios of Later . . . With Jools Holland, her speech halting and tentative. "I think I was, too, because I did the opposite of everything that everyone else was doing. In particular, I noticed that people didn't like my voice. They thought it was too bass-y, and because I loved to sing all the time, I think I kept to myself."
Surprisingly, cultural norms for female singers in Nigeria weren't a whole lot different to those governing the European scene, with pretty, high-pitched singers lauded at the expense of the earthier, primal voices such as Asa's.
"The likes of Celine Dion is someone who's seen as singing well," Asa observes, her radar finely tuned to the intricacies of a music industry that is as distracted by the visual as the aural. "If you had a low-toned voice, it was pretty strange back then. To me, that was a very cliched notion, but that was the criteria that ruled singing back when I was younger."
Spending extensive periods of her childhood with her grandparents, while her parents travelled, Asa led a solitary existence, one that gave her the licence to immerse herself in music. It was in many ways a form of escape that she relished.
"Music was my skip route, something that gave me solace," Asa says. "I trusted it, and when I was alone, I would talk to myself, console myself and even advise myself, using my imagination to talk my way through things. I was strong-headed about my path in life, and I knew that I wanted to follow music, but I was the only one in my family who was doing this. I wasn't writing a lot but I was improvising, talking through my music. It was the one thing that made me happy. It was my power, whenever I was sad."
Africa is inextricably linked with rhythms, but Asa's instincts would draw her to a melody line faster than to a rhythm. "Melodies, melodies, melodies," she says, dallying over the sound of the words as if savouring the sound of each syllable. "When you have a sweet melody, then you find a rhythm to make sense of it. Together, it's a fusion of both those things." A self-described Christian, who grew up in a Muslim family, Asa's music wasn't always appreciated at home, yet she says that it gave her refuge, diluting the alienation she felt among her peers.
"I was living with my grandparents, who were Muslims," she explains, "and they didn't understand what I was doing. I would sing in a place where nobody wanted to hear it. I would go in a room and sing, and talk about my pain, and they would hear it, and then that would get me into more trouble. But it was always my solace, really."
Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, a city so cosmopolitan that Asa describes it as the New York of Africa (where English is the official language), she took to songwriting in both English and Yoruba, two codes that offer her distinctly different angles from which to view the world.
"In Yoruba, I like to tell stories, in a way that I cannot do in English," she says. "In particular, when I want to write stories about my country or my tribe. I should not even try to translate songs from Yoruba into English, because it just waters it down. Yoruba is a language that talks in proverbs: one word can mean 10 different things. I enjoy that, because as I grew to understand my past through music, I embraced my culture and language, and then I began to appreciate deeply the richness of the Yoruba language. It depends hugely on what melody comes out first, and the word that comes out first too: that dictates the language I write in."
Asa has hit the ground running with her self-titled debut CD, and it's uncompromising yet disturbingly soothing first single, Fire on The Mountain. Touching on themes as wide-ranging as blood diamonds, war and paedophilia, she's evidently intent on pursuing a musical career far removed from "moon in June" rhyming couplets. In her role as "MTV Ambassador for Africa", Asa is unlikely to spend a whole lot of time pondering the finer points of her nail varnish as she ploughs headlong into a career that's hell-bent on uncompromising self-expression, over everything else.
"Fire On the Mountain had been on my mind for a very long time," she says, using it as a metaphor for change, on a continent that she sees riven with corruption and conflict. "We, who want a change, talk about it all the time. I wrote that song over a very short period of time, but the idea was percolating for a long, long time. Fire on the Mountain is a line from a well-known folk song that children sing, and I began to think: 'What could this fire be?' I searched for meaning for these words in real life, and what I found was so much truth in the image itself." Politically motivated by a desire to "show the world that something beautiful and positive can come out of the black continent", Asa sees her music as part of her need to be a force for change, and not just a cipher, content to languish on the margins while the world burns around her.
"Even among ourselves, we need to uplift our minds," she asserts unequivocally. "We need to believe in ourselves as Africans. We are the only ones that have the solution to our problems. Unfortunately the world sees us as people who need help, but with all this help, there's been no way forward, because very big problems are going deeper and deeper. It's really difficult, but we need to start to find the solutions to our problems within ourselves. My greatest fear is for the next generation, because everybody's so corrupt. Even when you find someone who wants to help, the corruption is so deep that you don't know where to start. I don't want to point my finger and just blame. I want to give hope because I've listened to people who have, one way or another, changed my life, directed my footsteps - people like Bob Marley, Erykah Badu and Miriam Makeba."
Asais released on Naïve