Kenyan-born singer, songwriter and producer Elsy Wameyo released her debut solo album, Saint Sinner this week, expressing the complexities of navigating through life’s dark chapters while remaining steadfast in her faith.
The 25-year-old who relocated to Australia at the age of seven after her father, an electrical engineer, landed a job as a skilled immigrant says the struggle for an identity is at the core of her art.
“Identity has been such a crisis for me because having left Kenya at such a young age and living in a place where you are not necessarily wanted means I have always grown up having a tug and pull between two different cultures,” she reflects.
That box could be the hip-hop or R&B base of her music but it could also be the versatility she exhibits on the album, offering a wide range of sounds and influences.
“I was a singer before I was a rapper and I enjoy rap jazz and rumba. I just create and I love to do what I want to do,” she told the BDLife in Nairobi this week, just days after she arrived in the city from shows in Denmark and Switzerland.
Elsy Wameyo, an Australian-based Kenyan singer, songwriter, and producer who has just released her debut album, Saint Sinner.
Photo credit: Pool
Studying music as a compulsory subject in schools in Australia gave her a basic understanding of the fundamentals and every Monday after classes her father would drop her off at a music studio.
Elsy who was in her mid-teens at the time sat and observed different sessions and after a while started signing choruses for the rappers who came to record at the studio.
In 2022, she released her first EP, Nilotic, an experience which exposed her to the “toxic underbelly” of the music industry.
“People just look at you as a commodity. That is where the Saint Sinner comes from; are you going to smile and be nice or say something and have them take it as a rude?” she poses.
She spent the whole of 2023 in Kenya trying to find new inspiration for her creativity.
“I just needed something fresh. I was tired and exhausted from touring in Australia and I knew to create something new I had to find inspiration and so that was coming to Kenya.”
She put together a team of top producers and writers: Polycarp “Fancy Fingers” of Sauti Sol, Wuod Omolo and Ywaya Tajiri who locked up in Naivasha for about two weeks.
“I had not met them before, so it was almost like I went into a house with random people with the goal to create an album,” she says with laughter.
Elsy gave the team a document containing her notes and quotes divided into saint and sinner columns with a description of the sonics, a reference to the sound, at the bottom.
The lyrics from Repercussions are taken from a journal entry during the hectic times of touring and Elsy turned the words into a song in which she switches from spitting rap rhymes to soulful vocals.
“There is a colour which comes with melody that rap does not have but on the other side of the coin, rap and hip hop have a fierceness that melody can’t ever create,” she explains.
“Both art forms are very significant depending on what I want to express.”
Ywahya Tajiri. singer, songwriter and a member of the duo Watendawili lends his unique vocals to Conquer, an Afrobeats flavoured song whose video was shot in Nairobi with a cast including Shelly Ajiambo, a ballerina from Project Elimu, Kibera which teaches dancing skills to children in the slums
Another stunning collaboration is Ler featuring the highly regarded singer Okello Max whom she invited to choose the song that would be the best fit for him after the whole album was written.
“He picked Ler which means the ‘light shines in the darkness’, vwhich is a reminder that no matter how far I run, God is always there. Okello recorded his vocals separately and when he sent them back I genuinely wept,” says Elsy.
Saint, whose chorus was written and secretly recorded by Polycarp before being offered as a surprise to Elsy marks for her the final destination.
“That is when I found God again and I understood why I had gone through all of these things,” she says.
Elsy has tour dates booked until the end of the year and she is currently in Nairobi rehearsing for performances in the UK later in August.
The album Saint Sinner is now available to stream across all major digital music platforms.
