It's HARD in the Ghana Music Industry | Kafui Dey interviews Worlasi

When he came back from Nairobi, he stopped doing MP3 performances. He found his live band. He understood what he was trying to connect to. It was pivotal in the same way the ceremony in the Volta Region would later be pivotal — a door opened to something that had always existed but that he had not yet been permitted to enter.

Baja Energy: The Ceremony That Changed Everything

His uncle's mother died. They travelled far into the Volta Region for the funeral. It was the first truly traditional Eʋe funeral he had ever attended — not the Christian-oriented ceremonies he had known, but something older. Her mother had been part of the traditional band. There was a large rectangle in the centre of things, and you could not enter it without walking around it first. Men were bare-chested. No slippers. The body lay in the middle and a red ribbon marked the boundary. They had to open it for you.

He was afraid to get close, though he did not know why. He liked what he was hearing. He liked their energy. But there was a force to it that kept him at a distance. His uncle asked if he wanted to understand what he was feeling. They both took off their tops, accepted a small drink, and entered. He was there for almost thirty minutes. He did not know what he was doing. It was almost as if they were all one — no rehearsal, no introductions, and yet he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do.

"It was nothing I have ever felt or experienced in my music career. Everything I've experienced is extremely technical or practical or rehearsal. I have not met these people. No rehearsal. I got there and I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to do."

— Worlasi, on the traditional Eʋe ceremony that became Baja energy

The name on the album is Baja — shortened from Abaja — but he calls it Baja energy because it is not just music. It is a trance. He is not trying to replicate what they have or share what they guard. He is trying to let people understand that this energy exists, that it passed through him, and that there is something in it — something older than guitars, older than drums as most people know them, older than any recording — that is worth approaching with your full attention and your full respect.

The songs are not on Spotify. He keeps them on Even, where people buy them. He values them too much to place them where he does not support the terms. Sustainability, not just fame, is what he is after.

Therapy: The Album as a Different Kind of Healing

He made the Therapy album in 2023 with David Hammond, a producer he met online who sent him beats just as he was beginning to think about the project. Hammond's great gift was that there was no ego in the room — only the idea, only the work. Worlasi needed that. The album required him to be open in ways he had not been before.

He grew up in a space that did not go to therapists. If something was bothering you, you called the boys, you sat at a spot, you talked it through socially and collectively. That was the group work. But this period was different — a quiet kind of stuck, a not-doing-anything, a weight in the head that did not lift. He could not afford five hundred cedis an hour. And he had begun to notice that friends who had been in therapy for years were better directed, perhaps, but not cured. You cannot cure mental health, a therapist told someone he knows. You can only point toward a slightly better space.

So he changed the ginger into fish stew. He took the raw thing and cooked it. The album came out as a full circle — childhood, trauma, the present, the future self. The last track was a recorded discussion about therapy featuring Obie, Lexi the comic, and a friend who had grown up with therapy as a normal part of life. They were all laughing about things that were, by any outside measure, terrible. Foreigners who heard it asked why they were laughing. It is a different thing altogether, he says, how we grew up.

Jealousy, How Many Times, and the Angry African

Jealousy is the song he is most proud of and most honest about. He found himself in a country where the dominant language is Twi, and where a song in that language will almost automatically reach places a song in Eʋe will not. He knows this. He is jealous of it — not jealousy in the corrosive sense, but the fear of missing out, the feeling of watching an open door and choosing not to walk through it and then wondering if you made the right call. He loves Eʋe. He loves the way it sits on instruments, the heaviness and softness of it, the proverbs, the tonations. He does not think he can ever stop. But he feels the cost of that choice every time.

How Many Times came from a different anger. Cecilia Dapaah. The money under the bed. He had told himself he would not write political songs anymore. Then a child died crossing a road near a school because there was no zebra crossing, and within three weeks of the death the government had installed one. We have to die before you give us what we need to cross the road. He was so upset he could not stop himself. The song still vexes him when he hears it. He hardly listens to it. It has too much pain in it. It did well without a single cedi of promotion because people felt it.

"How hard is it to be a musician in Ghana? He had pass chop ginger. He had pass. If you don't chop, you go sick die."

— Worlasi

He is not an activist, he insists. He does not want the title. Activists stand in front of bullets. He is someone expressing frustration from personal experience. It ends there. But the frustration is real and old and structural. There are countries that give artists grants to make albums about national heritage. Nobody in Ghanaian government came to support the OBisaba album. Those same people travel to Lagos to visit Fela's shrine. They go to see how a country has turned one creative life into a destination. And they come back and do nothing.

Nigeria, he says, is the biggest African country right now — not just economically, but in terms of how the world understands it. And the reason he loves Nigerians, the reason he knows anything about Nigerian culture, is through music and film. That is through art. Do you understand what I am saying?

Voices in My Head: The New Album

The album is called Voices in My Head. Vim. It is available on Even. It is the first project where the Baja energy runs fully through the work — a cappella hums sitting beside heavy percussion, quiet songs beside songs that shake. The themes are things he does not understand and does not have to understand, things he does not believe in but cannot ignore because they exist. He is not asking the listener to decode it. He is asking them to sit with it.

If you are hyped and jumping around, he says, sit down. If you are travelling, put it in your ears. If you are about to do something stressful, put it in your ears first. It is therapeutic for him personally. That is the only reason he is sharing it. The entry points are Safia and Silent Killers — one because it gives you vim in the quietest possible way, the other because it speaks, mostly in Eʋe, to the long centuries of what has been taken from Africa and the silence around it.

What Success Means

Peace of mind, he says. And a genuine understanding of self. Growing up he felt misplaced in rooms — he was only there for the music, and when the music was done he left. He did not understand that wherever he went was also his. That is the work now. Not the album, not the painting, not the tree planting — all of those are expressions of it — but the underlying thing, which is learning to be fully present in whatever room he is in, as a full person, not just as a musician passing through.

He does not know yet what his paintings will say about his music. He is not far enough into the experiment. But he thinks what they will do is harmonise it. Let people see his music instead of only hear it. Let them understand a full circle of Worlasi — the neighborhood, the grandmother, the ceremonies, the frustrations, the faith in something older than charts or streams. In twenty years, he says, he hopes Wasi will represent a way of life. It will come in music. It will come in art. It will come in books.

"Wasi means everything but nothing. You understand? And that is my name."

— Worlasi

He is still in the neighborhood where the music started. He is planting trees there. He is building a studio and a painting space and a sound that does not exist anywhere else. He is still asking himself the question his grandfather put to him years ago in Eʋe — something about the tie and the hand, about how one does not know what the other goes through — and finding, slowly, that the music and the painting and the trees are all the same question asked in different forms. And that he has his whole life left to keep asking it.