Chukwuka Ekweani, popularly known by his stage name Ckay (SEE-kay), is without a doubt one of the major musical discoveries of 2021 in Nigeria.
As of the time of reporting this post, the crooner’s remix of ‘Love Nwantintin’ had 32 million YouTube views.
“When I moved to Lagos, I needed to make money somehow to take care of myself because I wasn’t dependent on my parents,” Ckay explained. “So I started producing in studios around to make a living while pursuing my own stuff.”
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I didn’t have any friends, so I was basically approaching studios I discovered online and introducing myself as a producer and telling them what I could do for them.
I was working in three studios at the same time, one in Dolphin, Ikoyi; another in Surulere, and the last one around Alfred Riwane in the boys’ quarters of a house there. Then I started working in Chocolate City at some point, making it four. I did all this because I had to survive”, he told Guardian Life.
Asked how music began for him, he said: “I grew up in Kaduna and it was very uninteresting. My parents didn’t let me go out a lot because they were strict Christian parents. My life revolved around home, church, and school. My childhood was very regular and my parents were middle-class earners so it’s not like I had rich parents and I was balling, it was just very average but I had a deep curiosity for music that led me to learn how to play the piano, guitar and eventually producing and that’s kind of how everything started.”