Artist: TY Bello
Featured Artist: Joseph Company
Song: Greenland
Album: Greenland
Released: 2007
Producer: Mosa Adegboye
Duration: 4:19
“Greenland” is the title track of TY Bello’s debut album, and many listeners still hear it as a song of hope for Nigeria. It sits at number seven on the 15 track project, with Joseph Company credited alongside her.
Before going solo, TY first came to the spotlight as a member of the gospel group Kush, alongside Lara George, Dapo Torimiro and Emem Ema. The Greenland album took two years to put together, carried themes of love, family and nation, and went on to win at the Nigeria Music Awards and the Sound City Awards.
She’s also one of Nigeria’s best known photographers, and her music has kept growing through albums like The Morning Songbook and Heaven Has Come.
If you need a reminder that better days are possible for this country, play “Greenland” by TY Bello on the player below.
The dark season that gave us “Greenland”
TY Bello has said she wrote “Greenland” during one of the lowest points of her life. She had just returned from a six-month residency at the South London Gallery, and people around her were discouraging her from pursuing photography.
The words came to her while she was driving towards the Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos, at a time when everything around her looked dry. She forgot the song for about two weeks until it came back to her after prayer. Later, standing in the rain as grey clouds gathered, she took photographs that she saw as a sign that God would still open the heavens for her.
Many people read the title as a comment on Nigeria’s fertile land, but TY has described the song as encouragement she was singing over herself. She still holds that the land is green, not because her journey was easy, but because she believes God provides the harvest.
