“Growing up, music wasn’t an agenda for me. Waking up going to school, seeing people in their suits, watching movies seeing people in their offices… I wanted to be like that”, Gyakie said sitting across our conference table while we waited for the makeup artists to give her a face beat before her #Emergers2020 photoshoot.
Like any young person who grew up watching a lot of television, the people we wanted to become were the people we saw on television or the traditional careers our parents often claimed for us.
The lawyer, the bank manager, the doctor.
That explains Gyakie’s childhood fascination of wanting to grow up to become the career woman who wakes up before daybreak, puts on a suit and heads to her office in a high rise building with a cup of coffee in hand.
However, as destiny would have it, her office would become the music studio – a different type of career woman.
That path started when she was eight years old and had her first studio session to record her first song which has not yet been released.
“I wasn’t paying attention to my voice when I was younger but when I started interacting with more people I got a chance to go to the studio for the first time at the age of 8,” Gyakie said as she clasped her hands across the wooden conference table.
The young girl who wanted to go the path of a traditional career silenced the voice within her.
“I had my first studio session at 8 years old and recorded my first song, since then this voice keeps hitting me that I need to pay attention to my voice and I need to pay attention to doing music,” she said.
After that, the only way she kept her music side happy was trying her hands on a few songs and singing around the house.
“When I was a child, every weekend, my mother would let me stand in front of the family, that’s my dad and my siblings. She makes me try and assume I’m in front of a crowd and performing. I would sing and sing till I was tired”, Gyakie said.
This was repeated almost every weekend and sometimes when her mother’s friends came for a visit, she would be called on to sing and entertain the guests.
Those days “groomed me, so I wasn’t the shy type singing in front of people.”
However, it was when she got to the university that her interest in actually pursuing music as a career option started to rise again.
“When I got to the university that was when it hit me really hard to get into the studio and record an actual song and that is how “Love is Pretty” came about. “Love is Pretty” is her debut song which was released in 2019.
However, even the debut did not really make a good case for her to consider doing music as a possible career path.
It was the success of Never Like This, that sealed the deal. Never Like This has more than 104k plays on Soundcloud. The official lyrical video has 12k view on YouTube and the official music video has 66k views.
With such impressive numbers for a new musician behind her, Gyakie was welcomed to big stages in the country. From performing in front of the First Lady, Rebecca Akufo and performing at Tidal Rave and then at Rapperholic among others. 2019 was definitely a defining moment in Gyakie’s music career.
She has started off 2020 with a BBC interview and her very first feature with the award-winning highlife artiste, Bisa K’dei. The official lyrical video of the song called “Sor Mi Mu” had 2.8k views three days after it was posted on YouTube.
It is exciting to watch Gyakie entrench her position in Ghana’s music scene as she seeks new avenues to grow her sound this year.
ONE GOAL I HAVE SET FOR MYSELF IS TO DIE A LEGEND
– Gyakie
