Tyla, the South African sensation behind the global hit Water, has revealed how the pressure to conform to pop music once left her in tears.
The 23-year-old star experienced viral success with her 2023 hit but admitted that being pushed to create music that didn’t align with her identity left her “crying”.
She told Variety:
“[Those songs] didn’t feel like me at all. I remember being in my hotel room and my managers were calling me: ‘Come down, we need to cut the song.’ I was crying and thinking, ‘This is not what I want. I didn’t get signed to do this’.
“They had to [coax] me out of that room. But through doing that, I realised how much more I love African music. It made me more persistent in keeping my ideas.”
Reflecting on the recording of Water, Tyla shared:
“I think back to recording Water, and I couldn’t have been more closed off to the outside world. It was just me, my engineer and his pregnant wife in the studio. I used to be so shy.”
Despite the song’s success, Tyla confessed that she felt “trapped” at one point. Speaking to The Sun in London, she said:
“For a while, especially last year, I felt so trapped. Like, ‘Oh my word, I blew up and I just have to have everything right and everything has to be perfect now because the world is looking.’ It was kind of stressful for me.”
Recently, Tyla dropped We Wanna Party, her debut mixtape, which gave her the freedom to “experiment” with new sounds. She explained:
“I wasn’t planning on doing this. I was just making music at the beginning of the year. It was mainly for an album. But as I got closer to summer, I was like, ‘Hey the songs I was making were too good?…?where are the summer songs? We need some summer songs right now’ and I am just too excited to hold on to them. I really just want people to hear it and party to it, and see how I’ve grown through the years and just see who I am now.”
Tyla also credits part of her resilience to a certain mindset. She revealed:
“I just always knew I had something in me. I just always had that kind of peace knowing that this is the life I’m gonna live. I don’t let anybody or anything limit me or put me in a box. I think I’m just confident. A lot of people say arrogant, but I think everyone needs a little bit of arrogance, especially to make it in this industry and to make people believe in your music. If you’re not that proud and you don’t believe in your stuff as strongly as you should, why would someone else?”
