Tiwa Savage: The Message

“There is a saying that no one's free until everybody's free, and I believe that,” Tiwa Savage tells Ebro on the third episode of Apple Music’s The Message. “It's just hard for me to live my comfortable life, make all the money I want to make, have all the fame and the fortune and the success or whatever—and my neighbour's hungry, my neighbour's depressed, my neighbour's suffering. It's just really hard for me to sleep at night knowing that.” The budding superstar singer and songwriter knows the power of her own voice, speaking out in support of HIV and AIDS prevention, the eradication of rape culture in her native Nigeria and, most recently, the #EndSARS protests there. There’s a message to be found in her music as well. Savage’s latest album Celia speaks to a lifelong mission of female empowerment, the singer noting that she wrote it with young African girls in mind, specifically. When it came time to put together her The Message playlist, Savage chose tracks from peers and collaborators who strike a similarly inspirational chord, like Olamide, Naira Marley, Tems and Davido. She's also included a handful of her own tracks, most notably "Celia’s Song,” which Savage says has already reached people in the only way she could have hoped for. “When we were working on this record, I was feeling so heavy,” she says. “I used to feel like, 'Oh my god, we're stuck at home, lockdown; we don't know what the future's going to hold.' And when the album came out, a lot of people actually hit me up about this particular record. They listened to it constantly. [Telling me] how it just lifts their spirits. It just speaks on when you feel like you're at the bottom and life is just throwing everything at you all at the same time. This is one of those records that really just gives you hope.”