You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Just a heads up that this episode contains explicit language,
including discussion of a lyric that contains the n-word.
Oma Le is a Nigerian singer, songwriter, and producer.
He's one of the young stars of Afrobeats, the West African genre that's become a global phenomenon.
His new album, Boy Alone, has had multiple hits, including a collaboration with Justin Bieber.
For this episode, Oma talked to me about the song Never Forget.
Boy Alone was his late father's nickname, and the song Never Forget was inspired by him.
My name is Stanley Omar Didier and I'm also known as Omar Ley.
My father's name was Boyer Lowen.
My father is that guy who came out from a very,
very poor family and left the village and left his friends and went to the city all by himself and found his way,
found my mom and settled down.
He was one of the first persons that ever did that in his circle.
So people started calling him boy alone because like, yeah, he did everything by himself.
No matter what anybody says, he would do it alone.
So much of the reasons why people call him Boy Alone.
I had so much of that in me.