“I don’t see it the way you guys see it,” he says. “Crazy thing is, when Lewis posted, I only realised that Lewis was that big on that day. I just knew that he was a driver, and a dope driver. Then everybody started hitting me up, saying, ‘Do you know how big this thing is?’ I was just, like, ‘Okay, that’s dope.’ Some things, I don’t know how big they are, and I think that works to my advantage sometimes because it helps me stay rooted. So, I don’t have a big head about it because I don’t know much about it. But also, after letting it all sink in, I’m just, like, that means I’m getting closer to my goal.”
Keys, real name Musa Makamu, was born in Giyani, Limpopo, and raised in Polokwane. From an early age, he spent his Sundays in church. It was there that he first learned how to play the keys and became drawn to gospel music.
Given this background, making secular music was not a straightforward process. “The transition was kind of crazy, because I had to unlearn a lot of things musically,” he explains. “My sound was too ‘gospelly’, and people did not like that. We’re trying to feel like we’re at groove, not at a gospel concert. Time for church is time for church, and time for groove is time for groove. I had to unlearn a lot of things.”
In a bid to evolve his skillset, Keys started working with other artists. He paid particularly close attention to how people making it in the industry were doing things and found that his way of doing things wasn’t too far off the mark, he just needed to enhance an aspect of his production. Then, a conversation with his mentor helped him realise that he needed to stop trying to follow trends and just believe in himself. This was when his music started to pick up. “Samarian Boy was actually starting to become a big song, and the chat was, ‘This is a big song without any lyrics.’ There ain’t no lyrics, I’m just mumbling and stuff. And life just changed.”
