To be certified “gold”, an album needs to sell 20,000 copies in South Africa, 100,000 in the UK or 500,000 in the US. Since we have neither the RiSA nor the BSI nor the RIAA to do so in Nigeria, Adekunle Gold just took matters into his own hands and is speaking his own plaque into existence.

The singer’s debut album is titled “Gold” and its for reasons deeper than commercial performance, I know. Its due out on the 28th of this month but before we get the chance to actually listen to it, we get the chance to see who and who worked on one of the most eagerly anticipated projects of 2016.

Are we live?

Yes we are. So far, we’ve only heard 4 out of the 16 songs that are going to be on Gold but we can already tell the project is going to be very musical. There are a number of instrumentalists that added to the project to give it, what I’m sure will be, a live feel. The prodigious Fiokee played additional guitar for the album, as he’s done on a number of projects for the likes Iyanya and Flavor and on some of the biggest songs in recent years like D’banj’s “Scapegoat”, Tekno’s “Duro” and Kiss Daniel’s “Woju”.

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(LR) Fiokee, Femi Leye, Vicor Ademofe, Segun Atoyebi

But the instrumentalists came in twos, when Fiokee wasn’t playing, Femi Leye was. Femi Leye has a smooth collaborative album with Chopstix titled Ibukun. You should check it out, if jazz is your kind of music. There were 2 bass guitar players on Gold, Brume and Biyi – you can read here about how bass players are historically underrated. Alaba handled the percussion, while live horn was played by two experts – the first is trumpeter Victor Ademofe and the second is saxophonist Segun Atoyebi.  

As you Simi so

Adekunle Gold hasn’t denied dating Simi but he hasn’t exactly embraced the rumors either. Those rumors will only get more intense as the YBNL singer made the soul singer the solitary guest artist on this project. Simi also engineered the entire Gold album, save for Adekunle’s first single “Sade” which was handled by Vtek. That’s impressive, I was about to end that with a “…for a lady” but we don’t want feminists to stop coming to our website. Another important lady on this album is TY Bello who snapped the pictures for the project, while Adekunle himself and Uche Ugo controlled the artistic direction of the album artwork. The album cover is understated, purple is the dominant color, possibly to show royalty, while Adekunle dons a golden agbada, sits on the floor and gazes intensely into TY’s lens.

Creative Control

Olamide is no where to be found on this album – he isn’t even EP’ing the project, Adekunle is. But not to fear though, the “Orente” singer is still very much signed to YBNL Nation or at least for this album. YBNL’s producers B Banks and Pheelz ably represented their boss in the studio, I’m sure.

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Olamide out, Oscar Heman-Ackah in

The other producers on the project are Adekunle’s former group mate Seyikeyz, newcomer Sleekamo, the omnipresent Masterkraft and the OG Oscar Heman-Ackah, who also A&R’d the LP. Oscar has a long and storied career but most recently, he put together Darey’s  heavenly record “Pray For Me”. Oscar was assisted by Michael Seyi Bakare. Adekunle is currently managed by Red&XLA.