Music as More Than Entertainment: On Songwriting and Healing

Music is classified as entertainment, and in commercial terms that is accurate. But it undersells what the activity actually does — for the person making it and often for the person hearing it. I did not fully understand this until I had been writing seriously for several years.

Writing as a way of understanding

We are generally taught to process difficulty through language — conversation, prayer, writing things down. Songwriting does something adjacent but distinct, because it demands that a feeling be made precise enough to fit a structure.

You cannot write a decent verse about a vague emotion. The form forces specificity: what exactly happened, what exactly it felt like, what exactly was at stake. That process of compression frequently teaches me what I actually think, which is not always what I assumed I thought when I sat down.

By the time Without You was finished, I understood the commitment I was making more clearly than when I began writing it. The song was not a report on a conclusion I had already reached. It was how I got there.

The spiritual dimension

Growing up in Nigeria, music was never purely recreational. It was woven into worship, into gathering, into marking the significant moments of a community's life. Music was something you did together for a reason.

That framing stayed with me. For Your Love Was Created comes directly out of it — the idea that a person is made both to receive love and to extend it, which is a thought I could not have argued convincingly in prose but could sit inside of in a song.

When listeners tell me a song met them somewhere spiritual, I take it seriously, because that is the tradition the music comes from.

What it does for the listener

The part that continues to surprise me is how specific the reported effects are. People do not usually say a song was good. They say where they were when they heard it, and what it helped them do.

Songs have been played at weddings I was not present at. They have accompanied people through periods of real difficulty. Someone once described using a track to say something to a person they could not find words for directly.

None of that is entertainment in any ordinary sense. It is closer to a small piece of infrastructure that people use to carry things.

Vulnerability is the mechanism

Music can only do this if the writer takes an actual risk. Songs constructed to be safe — no real detail, no admission, nothing that costs the writer anything — do not attach to anyone, because there is nothing there to attach to.

This is uncomfortable in practice. Publishing something honest means it will be heard by people who know you, people who do not, and people who will judge it. The alternative is writing that reaches no one, which is a worse outcome for everyone involved.

You do not need to be a musician

Two things are worth separating here.

Listening carries much of the benefit. Finding music that matches something you are carrying, and returning to it deliberately, is a real and legitimate way of processing experience. It is not a lesser version of anything.

Making it does something additional, and this part does not depend on talent. The act of trying to say something accurately in a structured form is clarifying regardless of whether the result is any good or whether anyone ever hears it. Most of what I have written was never released and was still worth writing.

A necessary caveat

Music is genuinely helpful. It is not a substitute for professional support when someone is struggling seriously. I have found writing steadying through difficult periods, and I would not want anyone to read that as a reason to avoid speaking to someone qualified. The two are complementary rather than alternatives.

Why I keep doing it

I write regularly, mostly on things that will never be released, because it is how I stay honest with myself about what is actually happening in my life. The four released singles are effectively four dated entries in a much longer private record.

That is the part that would keep me writing even if the streaming numbers went to zero. The career is downstream of it, not the reason for it.