Twenny 21

This is one of five songs I wrote in December 2021 that weren't originally planned for this project. It's a song I wrote as a recap of my year, from my entry to the Nairobi stand-up comedy scene in January, to my third-place finish at the South Africa Regional Finals of the Tekken Online Challenge in December. When I came up with the idea, I thought it would go well with a slow afrobeats song, so that's what I set out for when I found the beat on Dagi's BeatStars profile.

I was inspired to include the voice note from my girlfriend Joan at the end after listening to "Woman" by Little Simz and "My Little Love" by Adele, off their critically acclaimed albums Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and 30, respectively. "Woman" left a greater impression on me because of the variation in the music's arrangement during the outro while the voice note plays (I thought the voices in the middle were particularly cool). That gave me the idea of trying to maximise the emotional impact of Joan's voice note by killing most of the drums halfway through it while humming the melody of the chorus, with the Maasai chants I sampled from the "Only" beat creeping in the background.

Speaking of that voice note, it's one Joan had actually sent me on WhatsApp, though I chopped it up a little bit to get rid of the bits irrelevant to the song while still making it sound natural. I was previously mulling over including voice notes I had sent to my brother while going through an episode of depression in the middle of the year, but after giving it some serious thought I felt it would take too much away from what's supposed to be a hopeful song, aside from making it way longer than it needed to be. When I later got the voice note from Joan, it was almost as if the universe knew exactly what the track needed, even though she was simply sending some love my way.