Lady Donli: “That’s what music is for me – the transmission of joy”

Lady Donli is done with being put in a box. “I just love music,” she replies when I ask how she defines hers. “I love how it can take on different forms and live in different places.” A star known for blending R&B, Afrobeats, highlife and jazz, she’s never been willing to stay in one lane.

This approach to styling can be traced back to the music Donli was exposed to as a child watching Channel O and MTV. “It helped that I was the youngest,” she laughs. “My brother would come home from school and just want to watch music videos. I wanted to watch cartoons, but hey, we only had one remote.”

Before long, Donli was in the studio, and although it was to record a jingle for a noodles ad, it sparked a life-long love of recording. After growing up experimenting with music and poetry, Donli finished university in the UK and returned to Lagos with a renewed passion to release. Her mixtape Love or War came out in 2014 and was followed by her debut album Enjoy Your Life in 2019.

“I feel like Enjoy Your Life was really a moment in Nigerian culture,” she says. “We had reached a point of regression and all the music coming out was being viewed through this Afropop lens. When I was growing up, we had artists creating their own energy… I wanted to revive that and show that there are so many more elements of music to tap into.”

Pan African Rockstar, released last year, came next. Suffering from imposter syndrome, which Donli states is common among female musicians in Nigeria’s hyper-masculine culture, she wanted to make a body of work that boosted feminine confidence. “That’s why all the songs have the message of ‘you’re the number one motherfucker,’” she laughs.

Donli doesn’t want to stop there. She dreams of becoming the CEO of her own label. “We could have an industry which thrives on different dimensions, but people are so bent on what is popular right now. I want to nurture community-led artists who have people that still love them 20 years on,” she explains.

Community building is something Donli has already incorporated into her own practice. Aware of the alienating price of tickets, she put on four free shows in Lagos last year. She also created a Discord channel to chat with fans, invited them on stage for birthday numbers and created merch so they could be recognisable to each other. “People are the foundation of music,” she explains. “It’s all about finding new ways to nurture that.”

And although she hasn’t got that CEO moniker just yet, Donli’s already championing diverse talent. Tapping into the new wave of electronic music which is popular in the rave scene in Lagos, Donli reached out to the duo FäēM who had already remixed a few of her tracks for a project. “It’s my way of spotlighting a scene and seeing what that does for them,” she explains.

Not harbouring a passion for electronic music personally, Donli explains this move reflects a wider experimental approach she has to music and the different spaces it can reach. “We do this electronic project and then that lives on the dancefloor. Ultimately, that’s what music is for me – the transmission of joy.”

It’s that joy that Donli recently brought to a tour of North America and a headline show at London’s Jazz Cafe, and which she’s embodied over her decade-long career. I ask her the biggest lesson she’s learnt during this time. “That I don’t know anything,” she laughs. “And that’s how you need to approach music. You need to be a student of the game forever. And enjoy being that student – being a master is overrated.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today