Tiwa Savage was born on February 5, 1980, in Isale Eko on Lagos Island. When she was 11, she travelled to London to visit her brothers and expected to return to Lagos afterwards. Her mother, however, announced that she would be staying in London to start school there, and the move turned out to be a painful one as schooling in London was hard for her. She was bullied badly for her thick Nigerian accent and for being very skinny, with long limbs and no hair, and she has said that this stretch of her life also included running away from home a few times and being suspended from school a few times. Things however began to change when she developed a crush on a boy in her music class. Because of him, she joined the school music program, and since the only place left in the band was on the trombone, that is the instrument she played.
Music slowly became her way out of the loneliness she felt as a child. She began turning up at talent shows around London, and at one of them she met Laurence Johnson, who owned Tuff Sessions, a company that hired backup singers for musicians. After a short audition, he signed her and became her manager. By 16, she was singing backup for George Michael, and that opened the door to sessions with artists such as Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan and Kelly Clarkson.
Her parents wanted her to have a safer career plan, so they encouraged her to study business administration at the University of Kent, where she has joked that she once failed a finance course. After graduating, she took a job in accounting at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which gave her the stable career her parents had hoped for. Music kept on pulling her back, though, and when Mary J. Blige’s team, who already knew her from her session work, called about a European tour starting in just three days; she left the bank to join it. Walking away from a secure job meant she now had to make music work, and her parents again encouraged her to get proper training if she was serious about it.
On the advice of Keith Harris of the Black Eyed Peas, she chose Berklee College of Music in Boston and studied there on a full scholarship, majoring in professional music with a focus on music business, songwriting and production.
In 2006, while still at Berklee, she reached the final 24 of The X Factor in the UK but did not win. Over the next few years, she sang backing vocals for other artists, including on Whitney Houston’s I Look to You in 2009, and wrote songs for them too. One of the songs she wrote for Fantasia Barrino, an American Singer, titled Collard Greens & Cornbread, earned her a Grammy nomination.
Money was also a constant problem during her years in the United States. As an international student, she was not allowed to work, so she had to get by on whatever help she received from home, and that was not enough to pay for a place of her own. She has said she ended up living in a women’s shelter in Bed-Stuy, in a building that also housed women battling drug abuse. One evening at a restaurant in Times Square, she sat across from her friend Elizabeth Elohor, a former beauty queen, and ordered only an appetizer. When Elohor asked what she was ordering, she insisted that she was not hungry, and when Elohor asked again, she broke down and admitted, “I don’t have money.” Elohor ordered her a full meal and packed extra food for her to take home, and that night Tiwa went back to what she called her little box of a room and cried again.
By 2012, she took the biggest risk of all and moved back to Nigeria, which meant rebuilding her reputation from scratch after years of respect abroad. She had been warned that artists who came home before her were not always welcomed and that it would be even harder for a woman, and Lagos proved the warning right. People asked, “Who is this girl who dresses like this?” while some of her videos were banned over her outfits. Some promoters also left her off their shows, either because she was a woman or because they feared other women would feel threatened by her confidence.
She kept hustling with Tee Billz, who would later become her husband. Together they built a label and pushed her self-released single Kele Kele Love until it caught on, and then she asked Don Jazzy for the label support she needed and signed to Mavin Records. The adjustment was still difficult, because moving from R&B to street sounds did not come easily to her, and she has credited Don Jazzy with convincing her that talent has no limits.
Her debut album, Once Upon a Time, arrived in 2013, and the doors finally began to open. She won Best Vocal Performance (Female) at the Headies for Love Me (3x) and took home Best Female at the 2014 MTV Africa Music Awards. In 2016, she became the first African artist signed to Roc Nation, and in 2018 she became the first African woman to win Best African Act at the MTV Europe Music Awards, as well as the first African woman to sell out Indigo at The O2.
When her album Celia arrived on August 27, 2020, she became the first African artist to put two billboards in Times Square on release day, in the same Times Square where she once lied about being hungry. The first time her picture went up there, Elohor was the first person she called, and she has never forgotten who made that dinner possible.
In July 2022, Tiwa returned to the University of Kent, the same school where she once failed a finance course, to be made a Doctor of Music at Canterbury Cathedral. In her speech, she spoke openly about her failures and about being bullied at school, and then she told the graduating class, “Some call me queen, but it’s Dr. Savage from now on.” She also told the graduates that she hoped they would one day stand where she stood because they, too, had never given up. It was a lesson she had already shared with her friends at her Celia surprise party, when she said, “If I gave up five years ago I wouldn’t be saying this story.” The doctor’s robe, the sold-out shows and the billboards in Times Square all trace back to the same decision she kept making, which was not to give up.
