Life is moving fast for the pop/R&B artist Dreamer Isioma. The Chicago-bred, Nigerian-American artist became a viral sensation after posting the single “Sensitive” in early 2021 and attracted some renowned fans, Lizzo and SZA among them. Isioma has since released two albums of otherworldly slow jams and futuristic funk, which will be performed at Sonia on Friday.
“I’m glad and grateful if people think I’m cool,” Isioma (who is nobinary and uses they/they pronouns) said this week. “It affected me a lot — All of a sudden I have these eyes on me, so I’d better do something about it. I went right from five to five thousand, that’s for sure. The attention motivated me to work harder, but it didn’t affect my personality. I’m still very much who I was when I started, I just know more and am a little wiser.”
To make the new album “Princess Forever,” Isioma investigated a lot of philosophy and music history. “With each project I do, I like to reinvent myself and show a different side. I started conceptualizing this record because I was in love and wanted to create a world out of that. So I started researching about Afro-surrealism and Afro-futurism, and my specific relationship to it. I’m a Nigerian person living in America, who grew up in the ‘burbs for a good chunk of my life. So just living in that world is super trippy– not just experiencing racism and those micro-aggressions, but also the vast cultural difference. That gives you a very specific lens to see through, so I was trying to write my music around that.”
They also did a dive into music history. “I grew up in the internet age, so I always had the world a click away. While making this album I did some research on the OF rock stars and the soul and rhythm and blues pioneers — Chuck Berry, Nina Simone, the Temptations. I was really studying how they wrote their hits, how they got people to move. And Tina Turner, rest in peace, was an icon, so I wanted to get some of her flair in there as well.” But a lot of the music also happened by accident. “Me and the friends I produce the songs with were literally making up the sounds as we went along — ‘What does this do, and what happens when you twist this?’ That was the whole creative process.”
One of their themes harks back at least to Prince’s “1999”– the idea of finding love and having a party while the world’s about to end. “Love is fun but it also hurts, so that’s something I talk about a lot. The world isn’t necessarily ending but it’s certainly messed up, and even if you’re living in the bubble of love you can’t ignore that. So the duality of that goes back to surrealism as well.”
Isioma intends for their music to be inclusive, and a few of the new songs examine gender identity. “That’s especially true on this album which I’d say is very femme, very pink and glittery. I was feeling cute and didn’t see why anyone, especially a mas [masculine] presenting person, shouldn’t be feeling like a princess. So I made a whole album about it.”
