Giving music her all
Donna Adja is someone to look out for in the music industry. Her Urhobo name, Ogheneyerowo, means ‘God answers prayers’. Born on June 26, 1984 in Eku, Delta State, Adja is a singer, songwriter and fashion designer aiming for the stars. Growing up, little Adja saw lots of actresses on TV and wanted to be like them. “When I was a child, I would stand in front of the mirror and wanted to be a star. I wanted to be on TV and to be known,” she discloses.
Filled with hopes of succeeding and expecting to reach her goals, Adja moved to Lagos. But things didn’t turn out quite the way she expected. “I came to Lagos because of acting but it was tough,” she recalls. “The film industry here is very complicated because people would say, ‘you are too skinny’. They only want to sleep with you and take advantage of you,” she continues, adding that, “I didn’t want to sell my personality under value.” Undeterred, she continued soldiering on with minor roles in some films. She played a nurse in ‘Together as One’; was a doctor in ‘Golden Mask’ and had minor roles in several other B-movies but the stress of acting increasingly gave her a hard time. “I felt stuck in acting, like [I was] in a box and wanted to break out and do something else.” Those unsavoury experiences made her rethink, and eventually, she realised another talent which led her up another career path – music, her real passion. “Music is different from acting and my voice was too good to waste away,” she notes.
New life in music
After bidding farewell to acting, Adja was a supporting vocalist for musicians in Lagos studios. Fortuitously, she heard that the manager of Sheraton Hotel was looking for singers. She turned in a song sample,”He auditioned me and liked my voice” she recalls. After a week’s probation, Adja started to sing at Sheraton in 2007. Two years later, she started her own band with equipment bought by the hotel’s manager. She thereafter began performing four times a week. What Adja plays is a mix of Afro and RnB ,she calls it ‘Afro-HipHop’. It features conga, native and talking drums, guitar, saxophone and keyboard with which she sets the house on fire during her shows.
She had however shown interest in music prior to becoming a professional. Adja first sang in public aged 17 as a member of the junior choir in her church. She later gave a solo performance of a self-composed song with the senior choir.
Further inspired by her idol, Michael Jackson; her favourite song ‘Smile’ by Nat King Cole and singer Celine Dion, Adja felt music was worth the effort. “I used to listen a lot to [Dion], I love her songs, I love the lyrics, I just love everything about her.” Luckily for Adja, she discovered that, “singing belongs to me, it’s inside of me, I live with it.”
Local and international tours
After a while, Adja began seeing the bigger picture and became dissatisfied with just hotel-lounge in terms of performance. She took matters into her own hands and thus embarked on a tour of Nigeria, with Abeokuta, Ogun State being her first stop. She played with her group, ‘Sugarband’ at a birthday party of Nigeria’s former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. “It was a special performance for him and a good experience for me. Something really special,” she recalls.
After some more shows in Lagos, Adja travelled to Sydney, Australia, for three weeks to play at a birthday party for a certain Mike Smith, who paid for the trip and also facilitated a free video shot. Adja soon began working with him as he showed interest in becoming her manager in Australia. Thinking he was her messiah because he had promised to make her famous, the singer gave all her songs to Smith who started mixing them. They even agreed on a profit sharing formula, and he initially tried to set up interviews with radio and TV stations. But it was a smokescreen. Smith eventually betrayed Adja, refusing to hand back her materials. This hit the artist hard and she began to question herself and the music industry. But like the phoenix, she rose again.
All is not lost
On return to Lagos, Adja’s Friday night gigs at Sheraton caught the attention of a Briton who booked her for a wedding in London. London turned out to be a good place for the singer; and her wedding gig led to further bookings. Among these was her performance at the Soffice Festival in the UK.
Dreams don’t die
Currently working on her first album, Adja hopes to open a big fashion house called ‘DA-Fashion-House’. She has a flair for fashion, and self-designs her stage costumes. “Fashion and music, that’s what I want to do,” she declares.
On why she doesn’t want to live and work in Nigeria, Adja discloses that, “entertainment business here is progressing but to me, it is not impressive. Piracy is too much; [the] work is not worth the effort because you don’t earn the money you deserve. The market is not honest. Betrayal in Nigeria is worse than anywhere else.” Ultimately, she hopes her artistic future will reflect the benevolence of her Urhobo name: ‘God answers prayers’.
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