Tears can be medicine. A humbling experience can be medicine. Heartbreak can be medicine. Dance can be medicine. Music can be medicine.

When I first encountered this idea, it resonated with me immediately. 8 years ago, before I was about to take part in a kambo ceremony that I was feeling fearful about, the shaman said to us all:

“Remember, this is medicine - there’s no need to be afraid, it is here to help you heal”.

With those words, all my fears and uncertainties fell away. Rather than bracing myself against what was to come, I felt myself soften and surrender to the experience - creating space in my being for the healing to happen.

Through this expanded lens of understanding, medicine is whatever creates a space within for healing to occur.

It can be bitter, strong and unwanted. It can be sweet, delicious and warmly welcomed. It can be administered once-in-a-lifetime - or it can be a daily dose. Most often we cannot control what form the medicine takes, we can only control how we choose to receive it.

For me personally, viewing life itself as medicine helps me practice finding the still point between strength and softness. The strength to stay centred in the face of challenges and the softness to surrender to them, allowing myself to relinquish the fight for control and remain in a state of flow.

I feel that in this context, if the experiences of our lives can be medicine then we ourselves, too, can also be medicine.

I believe that each of us has medicine to share with the world. The quality of that medicine of course varies as widely as does the human experience. When we turn our attention inwards to understand and befriend ourselves more deeply, we can start to become better acquainted with who we are in our fullness - and discover what kind of healing we ourselves can offer to others simply by living the truth of who we are.

A couple of months ago I was lucky enough to get to go and see Kendrick Lamar perform at the O2 in London. It had been a long time since I’d been to a concert of that size and scale. The energy was electric, thousands of people’s voices lifted together for literally almost every song. However, what struck me the most was - of course - Kendrick’s performance itself. His use of the space, his curation of the set list, the fact that he rapped every single syllable of every single song with no vocal backing track, how he chose to perform each song like it was a scene in a play, his use of lighting and quotes on screens. It was a piece of art and theatre as much as it was a hip hop concert. Even way up in the back, I felt fully the intentionality with which he had crafted the show and understood that this latest album - in its own way - was also truly medicine music. He is no longer living only inside the story of his life but also is a witness to its unfolding, able to see and beautifully lyrically reflect on the medicine of his experiences in a way that, in itself, becomes medicine for others.

My first EP ‘Medicine’ is an expression of that which which feels authentically mine to offer.

As I have moved along my own path of healing, I have experienced it less like an evolving and more like an excavation. A revealing of who and what was always there underneath what we all carry with us - the conditioning, the traumas, the projections of others.

These songs are the essence of me. They are what is at my centre. An expression of the core affirmations that my life is a manifestation of. Underneath the many layers of my identity, underneath the stories of love and loss and love again, underneath my journey - the seeds of my Soul. Like life itself, the songs are cyclical and spirallic rather than linear. There is a simplicity to them that does not detract from their power or beauty. They are inspired by my own healing journey - coming to me at the times when I myself most needed to hear their words. These songs are intended as affirmations, as words of manifestation - helping call us back to who we are in our most wild and natural state of being.

As you experience them, my intention is that they be a medicine for you. That they create a space within you that allows for healing - however fleeting - to arise.

My debut EP ‘Medicine’ is out now on all digital streaming platforms.

After just over a year in the web3 space as a creator, it feels finally time to properly introduce - or at this point, re-introduce - myself.

2023. A new year begins. Whilst to some it can seem arbitrary, I personally always welcome the opportunity to reset, recalibrate and recenter my intentions and direction. This post is a part of this process. I have always loved long-form writing. It’s something that I’ve missed in web3 where most of us have only 140 characters or the occasional Space to tell our stories. Twitter no longer feels sufficient as the sole place for me to exist as an artist in web3. My intention is for Mirror to be the place where I can dive more deeply into my reflections, inspirations and the long-term vision for my work. Before I begin to share where I am at and where I am going, it feels important to share where I have been.

Like all of us, there are many facets of my being.

I believe we are not just one person but a whole tribe of different selves. I am a musician. I am a healer. I am a mother. I am a lover. I am a wife. I am a dancer. I am a dream weaver. I am a student of the stars. I am a child of the moon. I am a devoted initiate to the magic and mysteries of the universe. I am a woman. I am an ancient Soul. I am stardust.

Music is in my blood.

My Yoruba ancestors were travelling performers. My great-grandmother’s family would journey through Yorubaland (now known as Nigeria) making their living singing the songs of the noble houses of the villages they visited. On my mother’s side, my great-grandfather’s fiddle still sits pride of place on her bookcase and I listen avidly as she tells me again the story of how his musical talent saved him from the front lines of WWII and swept a country boy from Northern England into the company of a group of Black-American jazz musicians performing for the soldiers all over Europe to boost morale. My father is a musician. Deep in his bones. Growing up, music soaked our home and the songs that he played again and again on vinyl still set my feet dancing to this day.

In truth, I have written songs and have been singing for as long as I can remember.

As a child I would write them down on A4 paper in shaky handwriting, perform them for my family, sing them into my mum’s portable tape recorder. I learned piano and guitar, was in all the musicals throughout high school and would always team up with other girls from my class to pull together choreographed song and dance routines for the school talent shows. Going to a posh private girls school with a strong focus on academic prowess rather than creative exploration, I didn’t pursue my dreams after leaving school. In fact, at that time, I think I barely had the space to acknowledge them as that. But the music stayed with me. I tried being in bands but never found my own creative expression within them. Nonetheless, my voice notes app was always filled with hundreds of snippets of lyrics and melodies that I would record as they came into my head.

The first full song I wrote and composed alone was when I was 24.

My ex had moved out of our flat and left his electric piano until he found a new place. For the first few weeks I resented it taking up space (I hadn’t played piano since giving up lessons aged 16) but during a brief relationship with an avid musician, my own musicality was sparked and one day I simply sat down at the piano and a song spilled out of me. Then another. Then another. As life brought me blessings and challenges, I found myself again and again pulled back to the piano to give form and melody to my experiences.

The first time I sang my own music in front of an audience was in one of my now favourite places in the world - The Sanctuary on the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand at an open mic in early 2015. I had no instruments so I simply sang acapella. I remember being so nervous that my voice shook and yet there was something exhilarating and uplifting being up on that stage sharing my music with a captive audience. Songs that were written from such a personal place seemed to resonate with people deeply and I received a lot of wonderful feedback. I was also approached by an A&R guy from Columbia Records who gave me his details and told me to reach out to him when I’d recorded some of my music properly.

That trip carried a lot of learning and growth for me in many, many ways. I returned from it with a little spark that would eventually grow into the roaring blaze that is now my desire to fully step into my truth as a musician. I remember sitting in a cafe with my friend days after returning to London, excitedly telling her about the developments and us brainstorming ideas for a stage name - already naïvely dreaming of record deals with XL Records.

At first, I tried to find a way to realise my re-discovered dream within the web2 industry landscape.

Being ‘only’ a singer with rudimentary skill at the piano and guitar, I felt that I needed compatible producers or instrumentalists who were committed to helping me with my music to succeed. Despite some promising beginnings, I never did find anyone were there was a lasting connection. In hindsight, the lack of success in that area tells me as much about where my own level of commitment was at that time than anything else. The idea had been sparked in my mind but I wasn’t yet really anywhere near embodying it fully in my heart.

The next time I was back in The Bay at The Sanctuary singing my songs in 2016, the same A&R guy was there and he once again reiterated that if I produced a demo he would help me get it in front of the right people. I rose to this opportunity towards the end of 2017, however, in the end nothing came of it. I remember speaking with my dad at one time when I was feeling particularly despondent and him asking me ‘if I really wanted it’. If I was prepared to go the distance with a record company that really wanted to back me - and do what needed to be done to become a ‘success’. Deep down, I knew that the answer was no - I wasn’t ready for that. Would I ever be ready for that? To sign a multi-year contract with a massive corporate machine? To create on their timeline? To their brief? Signing huge chunks of my creative output away? Nothing about that resonated with me on a soul-level. I also already had an intuitive sense that I would be ready for motherhood in the near future and I knew that launching a signed-artist career alongside that lifelong adventure very rarely went hand-in-hand.

Something just wasn’t connecting. My own inner drive was not yet coming from a place of true alignment.There was more internal work to be done before I was truly ready to begin to claim what was mine - in the way that was right for me.

For a while, I gave up the dream.

At the time, there didn’t seem to exist a world in which I would fully be able to realise myself as an artist in a way that was aligned with how I wanted to live my life. I turned my focus away from outer worldly success towards inner alignment. I dived deeply into my spiritual practices - dance meditation, plant medicine, Tarot, astrology, dreamwork, a psychotherapy training. Tools that helped me navigate my inner landscape, heal what was broken, truly begin to open my heart and come more fully into alignment with who I was born to be.

It was in that space of complete surrender that I finally found the seeds of a sound that would grow to feel truly, authentically mine.

I identify as a deeply spiritual person.

“Spirituality is neither a means of escape nor a pedestal from which to judge others, but instead an aspect of the human experience available to each and every one of us. It requires deep commitment, searing honesty and a willingness to face the most challenging aspects of ourselves, other people and life itself in order to know the very nature of existence from the inside, with visceral immediacy, not as a comforting platitude or a mystical equation.. We awaken to everything, not just the bits we choose, it must be an indiscriminate process which insists that we look the whole of life in the eye and know it as ourselves." - Unknown

I do not subscribe to any religion but I feel a deep reverence for and relationship with the Universe as the Divine Source of all things. Over the past 12 years, I have explored countless tools and practices on my path towards wholeness. One of the practices that I have found to be incredibly powerful is devotional singing.

In yoga, there is something called ‘bhakti yoga’ - the practice of selfless devotion. Part of this form of yoga is something called ‘kirtan’. A kirtan is where people come together to sing Sanskrit mantras accompanied by live musicians. It is easy to get lost in the music, the melodies and harmonies, the vibration of the voice in the chest opening up the heartspace, the simple rhythm of the mantra. Similarly, in fact even more so, singing around the fires of plant medicine ceremonies such as Peyote and Ayahuasca (known as ‘medicine songs’) I have found to be profoundly healing. Singing not to tell a story. Singing as a form of prayer. Singing to the Universe. For the Universe. Singing as a ceremony in itself. (My next post will explore this topic and how it inspires my own music in much more depth). I fell back in love with singing in these kinds of spaces.

Whilst back in Thailand for a dance meditation practitioner training, my first medicine song came to me during an all-night fire ceremony. Shortly after this, a friend introduced me to the Boss RC-505 loop station and I began my first experiments with recording my own medicine songs. Non-linear compositions composed solely of percussion and my vocal layers and harmonies.

I was in heaven. Suddenly I felt incredibly empowered.

I had found a way to create music by myself that felt like something all of my own. And it began to pour out of me. At the time, I didn’t think too much about how or if I would release it into the world. It was something that I did just for me. In challenging times, I would channel through these medicine songs with affirmations that I myself needed to hear to heal. I began to share them at ceremonies, at the end of my own workshops and classes and people often asked me where they could listen back to them again.

In 2018, I started to put live looping videos up on my Instagram and one day a producer reached out to me asking if I would be interested in working with him to record them professionally. In late 2021 (after pregnancy, a global pandemic and new motherhood delayed the possibility of saying yes to this invitation straight away), we finally recorded the first medicine song that ever came to me - ‘Roots’.

By this time, I had been in web3 for over a year purely as an investor/collector. I was already a firm believer in the paradigm-shifting technology that was becoming more and more accessible and after seeing the renaissance that was unfolding for visual artists at the time I was excited to see how things would play out for musicians. It felt like the perfect time to dip my toe into the web3 creator space with this first track and at the beginning of 2022 (11.11am on 02/22/22 to be exact!) I minted ‘Roots’ as my genesis NFT. (At the time of writing, 2 editions are still waiting to be collected.)

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x495f947276749Ce646f68AC8c248420045cb7b5e/20993651601168530950489316184609204131779329886140587451908141529413927829515

And here we are 1 year later.

After many years of seeking, I have finally found a place to call home musically. The web3 space has welcomed me, challenged me, inspired me, nurtured me and kickstarted my growth as an artist. Since being in web3, I’ve recorded to completion more songs than I ever have in my life (much of these still yet to be released in the coming year). I have made life-long friendships with other musicians who continually inspire my creativity in new ways. I have performed my own music live in London, New York, Miami (and of course in the metaverse!) Along the way, I have constantly been invited and challenged by the Universe to step up, level up, refine, hone, optimise and evolve my songwriting, my production, my rollout strategies, my live set, my artistry.

For all this I am eternally grateful.

This experience of fully immersing myself in the process has helped me to gain more and more clarity around which direction I want to move forward in in the year to come. Not just as an artist but also as a community builder. The Holy Grail of finding one’s own ‘sound’ is an ongoing unfolding for a musician and I feel that I am finally on this path. The question has evolved from ‘am I a musician?’ into ‘who am I as a musician?’ It is this question that I plan to use my Mirror articles to dive into and explore as the odyssey unfolds, as well as deeper storytelling around my musical inspiration, rundowns of upcoming collector utility and more.

If you’re still reading, I thank you deeply for giving me the gift of your time and attention.

This post can be minted for free. I want to offer people an opportunity to join my collector community in a fully accessible way, so that as I start to build out my regular token-gated offerings which will weave my healing offerings into my role in this space in a more meaningful way (more on this second aspect in a future post), anyone and everyone who feels called to take part in these has the option to do so.