Tommy Wá’s Soulful New Folk EP, ‘Somewhere Only We Go,’ Offers a Soft Place to Land

“Celestial Emotions,” the second track from his new EP, Somewhere Only We Go (out today via independent label Dirty Hit), is a perfect example. Just before the song resolves and rises again, WÁ sings: “Come here, my love, it’s a downpour of celestial emotions.”

But the way it comes out, he bends the words, borrowing what feels like a hundred melodic cadences. “Here” becomes “‘ere,” “love” softens into “laff,” and “emotions” is stretched luxuriously into “e-moh-shaaans.” It’s exacting in how intentional it feels, and how beautifully it lands.

“Expression has always been my thing. It started with writing and photography. I was practicing photojournalism for a number of years. For music, it was always in-and-out. I didn’t think about the industry aspect of music; I just wanted to be a live artist and play music and perform for people. My family was my first audience. [I would] sit down in the living room and play for them. [The feedback], in a way, shaped me, and that’s quite rare for an African home,” he says. “My thing has always been, ‘how can I tell a story?’ Music became more of a consistent way of drawing people in.” Over time, music, as opposed to images, became a more immediate way to communicate his ideas.

Moving around so much has made him a well-rounded human being, he says. “It’s made me as versatile as I can be, or as anyone who is observant can be. I’ve picked up different cultures. I’m a very picky eater, so not different foods [but] different mannerisms, realities. I’ve seen the poor, I’ve seen the rich. I’ve seen the ghetto.”

The downside to moving around a lot is that one never really develops an identity tied to one place, and in the process, loses out on establishing oneself within a community of long-time friends and associates. Could his sparse chords, poetry-as-song, and enchanting voice, which echoes the spirits of past generations, be placeholders for a deeper yearning?

“Right now, I have a list of friends, and I have names. Every week, or every month, I’m like, okay, I need to go through this list and check on them and how they’re doing. It’s something that I had to be very deliberate about. Before now, [moving around] has made me discover people in who they are at the moment, and be a friend to them. To an extent, it’s made people experience me in different ways, and me experience them in different ways,” the artist reveals. It has also deepened his capacity for grace; “a one-minute call can change things,” as he puts it.

But grace isn’t always easy to extend towards oneself. When he was done performing at the festival, a child who was in the audience came up to him with a poster. “It said, ‘always try to be kind.’ The cliffhanger was, ‘it is always possible,’” he shares. “I fail sometimes [to be kind]. The rationality of the society has gotten to me, but at each and every point, I try to practice kindness. I think at the helm of an African society at the moment, I think kindness can go a long way, and it will change a lot of things. They say stupid is the man who is kind in Nigeria, or West Africa, but I do believe that, sure, I could be stupid, but let’s see how it goes.”

It’s a thread that runs through his work. The sparse chords could also be an extension of his kindness; Tommy WÁ knows that we are all going through a lot, and he tries to give you as much as possible without overwhelming us. Wars are going on, famines are going on. The least we can do for one another on this forsaken rock we share is to extend kindness and gentleness towards one another.

Recorded over four weeks with producer Charlie Hugo, Somewhere Only We Go collects songs Tommy WÁ has been writing since 2016.

“I do write from a very visual point of view, like I’m creating pictures. A lot of it is puzzle-writing; I find a word that is very strong, and I put it down for years, it’s just there, lying down. I used to write to pictures,” he says, an extension of the skill he developed from capturing images. “[My songwriting process] is ever-changing. I’m writing from photos, I’m writing from movies, or everyday life in Ghana. My mantra for photography was [that] the challenge is often in seeing the familiar with new eyes. Things I describe in my music, Africans see every day — we see the sunrise, we see the sunset, we see the moon and the stars, we dance when no one is watching. How do we express our reality? That has been the thing I’m pushing.”

Latitude Festival was the first time WÁ played with a live band in Europe. He’s painfully aware of the painstaking work that needs to be done on the continent to get to a level where live music is respected and heard. For now, however, he views the continent as an incubator.

“It’s been going on for years. It started as a concept for a show back in 2021. It didn’t start as anything musical. Friends of mine, we would leave the city to go and pause and detach from everything in society that was happening at that time. We would go on hikes, we would go on trips,” he says. They would meet people from different villages on these trips, and some would cook for them. Sometimes, he’d take his guitar out and start playing. Something else was happening at the back of his mind. “When I name my projects, I never think about the song; I just name them without thinking about a title track. With this one, gracefully, when I was gonna go to the UK last year, two hours before my flight, the melodies just came, and Somewhere Only We Go became a project. That track described the whole project. All the songs tell a story where you can escape, go pause, be vulnerable.”

“I work with people that I can learn to trust, or grow in trusting them. Once I get to the studio, you give me a guitar, I play the music for you, and see where it goes. That was the approach with Charlie Hugo, who produced the project. As a live artist, that’s how I go about things. The recording was very minimalist; we didn’t do much, we didn’t bring a lot of people into the studio. In fact, the only other two people who played on it were a saxophonist and a percussionist. We were very minimalistic in the production of this project because we didn’t want it to be over-produced; we didn’t want it to lose that feel that you were in the room. That was the direction for us.”