No one is ever a single story. There’s always something beyond what you see, what you know, what you read, what you watch online. We’re all full human beings with full lives, full families, threads that go in ways you have no clue about. It’s part of what’s affecting the world today; we’re all seeing one story about each other. Judging people based on what we see them as on TV or walking down the street, without recognizing there’s more. Always more.

The worst thing you can do, Buwa says, is start someone’s story from the second chapter. Because there’s always something that happened before that. It guides how he lives and talks to people, how he creates. He catches himself sometimes, stops himself from assuming, reminds himself: don’t assume a single story. That’s a person with a whole life.

And maybe that’s why his music hits so hard. Because he’s not giving you a single story. He’s giving you his story; messy, complicated, joyful, painful, Nigerian, Canadian, queer, human. All of it at once. All the threads woven together into something that refuses to be reduced to one simple narrative.

When Buwa sings, you’re getting a whole person, standing in their truth, inviting you to see beyond whatever single story you might have been told about what a soul singer sounds like, what a Nigerian immigrant looks like, what queerness looks like, what love looks like.

Witnessing it firsthand: after one performance in Port Alberni with Joel Rao, an audience member approached him to say that after hearing Buwa’s music, he was going to “protect everybody I know who is black and who is gay.”

From one hour of singing. One hour of standing in truth.

That’s not entertainment, that’s transformation. That’s music cutting across demographics and dismantling prejudices in ways a thousand think-pieces never could. That’s what happens when you refuse the single story and offer up the full, messy, beautiful tapestry instead.

Kinky Boots is a story about acceptance and recognizing that we all bleed red, regardless of which different lanes we’ve walked. A factory owner meets a drag queen in London, they start making six-inch thigh-high boots to save the business, and through it all, they navigate understanding, bias, and love.

For Buwa, playing Lola was emotionally intense in ways he didn’t fully prepare for, pulling from real experiences, real pain, and real joy. The story mirrored his own life and the lives of people he knows and loves. He describes it as one of the best experiences of his life—and one of the hardest.

It took him a month and a half to let go of that character. A month and a half to process, to heal, to confront things he might never have had the chance to confront otherwise. The show helped him heal in ways he didn’t expect, forcing him to face things head-on.

And here’s the part that gets me: he remembers posting about the show on Instagram for the first time. The moment he made it public.  He laid on his bed with goosebumps running through his entire body, literally shaking, thinking about the backlash he might face from his Nigerian community.

A friend called; someone who’d seen the post and just knew, and Buwa admitted he wasn’t okay, that he was trembling and the goosebumps hadn’t gone away.

Growing up in Nigeria, where being gay wasn’t—and still isn’t—easy or accepted, he couldn’t have had this conversation a few years ago. He was scared of what people would think. Even now, he catches himself trying to hide, trying to be careful about what he says and where, worried about backlash from his community. But he’s getting older. And at some point, you have to be true to who you are. He knows some people will never understand, will never accept. He’ll probably lose people he grew up with, people he truly loves, people who loved him and helped him through life—people who might never be able to see beyond this one aspect of who he is.

But the older he gets, the more confident he becomes in standing in his truth. In being who he is. In accepting who he is. It’s a daily struggle, he admits. The way he was brought up, the world he’s closely connected to and loves—it makes authenticity complicated. But he has to be true to himself.And Kinky Boots was a turning point. After that Instagram post, after the shaking and the fear and the waiting for the world to end—nothing happened. People talked. It was fine. He was okay. He’s still here.

After Olu dropped in 2019, Buwa hit a wall.

COVID happened. And then… nothing. Everything he tried to write felt hard. Forced. Like he was trying to create rather than letting it flow out naturally. Classic writer’s block, but the kind that makes you question everything.

Then one day in 2022, randomly pacing around his house, a melody hit him. “Oh, that’s a nice song.” He stopped mid-pace like someone possessed, singing the thing back and forth, thinking, “This is nice. This is actually nice.”

He grabbed his phone, called his friend immediately: “Hey, I have an idea and it’s here now. So I need to do it now before it leaves. I’m going to give it to you, make some beats, and bring it back to me.”

And just like that, the dam broke. They ended up with seven songs, recorded five for the EP.

But here’s what makes Just Call Me Buwa different from Olu: confidence.

With his first project, if you look at the visuals, Buwa is blurred out in places. Which was fine—it was where he was at that moment. But with Just Call Me Buwa, he took risks. Real risks. There’s makeup. There’s costume. There’s presence. Things he would have been terrified to do before.

The title itself is a declaration: “Hey, this is me. Just call me Buwa. I don’t care.”

Well, that last part might not be entirely true—he admits he still cares sometimes, still has moments of fear and self-consciousness. But he cares less. And that shift, that willingness to be more visible, more himself, more unapologetic? That’s growth you can hear in every track.