I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it.
I'm just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I'm gonna talk about being single. I'm gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I'm gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you're able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.
Growing up, I felt like I couldn't talk about certain things until I had the outlets to do so. Once you're able to be honest and say things as they are, it removes this crazy stigma and fear around it.
My experiences are universal. I'm not doing anything embarrassing - to me what would be embarrassing is to talk about minutia. It would be embarrassing to get up there and not say anything.
My parents are older, and they lead a somewhat sheltered life. It was difficult to talk with them about things that were embarrassing to me, and that I had never spoken to them about
My parents are older, and they lead a somewhat sheltered life. It was difficult to talk with them about things that were embarrassing to me, and that I had never spoken to them about.
It's the balance I'm trying to find - not being disconnected but giving myself some space to be in my world. I feel like I'm surrounded by friends of mine who are very different from one another but all care about similar things. We talk about this a lot, and I think that's probably the main thing - being surrounded by good people is the best way to stay in a solid head space. You want to be able to talk about these things, and be able to think things through and feel things through. That's helpful for me.
It's easy to talk about digitalising things; it's quite difficult to do in a B2B environment. It's hard to digitalise that complexity.
Growing up I did commercials and things like that, but nothing serious. As I got older, my family is really hardcore into academics. They weren't wanting to necessarily support an acting career; it's a really fickle business, and it can be difficult and unstable. They were rooting for education and the whole nine yards.
Everybody's career is different. In this new age of being able to talk to the whole world at once, the possibilities are staggering, really, to be able to do things yourself. But I've always enjoyed my relationship with the record company.
We're all products of our environment, and I suspect that strength of will - the feeling, "I'm going to be able to do whatever you put in front of me" - is honed in an environment where not everything is easy. Ironically, growing up in that environment, you don't have a sense of aggrievement or entitlement. You just have a sense of overcoming.
Being able to tour and experience all of the stuff that comes from touring, and then being able to come back to Nashville, it's almost like therapy to be able to get into a session and talk about all of the things that I'm going through. It's so much more real to me.
It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.
So I realized when I was successful in a piece, it was because I didn't abandon a notion early on what it ought to be, and I let it take me along. So I've had songs that started out as being about the environment and ended up being love songs and love songs that ended up being about the environment. I've had things that I thought would be a poem and realized that it was just too big for that. I've got to do something larger and it became a play. I wrote one poem that started a whole play.
You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.
Today, with the media, the internet, things get out there about anybody, anytime, so there's nothing wrong about talking about your life, because someone else is going to talk about it and mess it up.