The first time I heard the soft melodies of Odie was back in 2016. I assisted my best friend on a video she was shooting for this emerging Hip Hop and R&B, Toronto-born artist. We used my home in San Francisco as the location for the shoot, and transformed my living room into a modest set for Odie, with softly-lit icicle lights trailing the wall behind an open space surrounding a center stool and mic. When we first met, he didn’t say much. He was polite and soft spoken, but didn’t fill the empty void of conversation with meaningless chatter, as most of us tend to do when we feel an awkward silence approaching. Instead, Odie kept to himself, savoring all of the genius he possessed for the real introduction that would ensue when he put his lips to the mic. That’s when he told us everything we needed to know. His voice was striking, like listening to a live lullaby of comforting vocals, over a haunting bassline and a catchy guitar melody. We became instantly enamored by this person who we knew nothing about- seduced by his music and fixated on the potential of his artistry. It’s been just two years, and the 21-year-old known to all as Odie (really short for Odunayo Ekunboyejo) has quickly worked his way into the spotlight. In 2018 alone, he has released his first album titled Analogue, and has embarked on his first world tour, hitting major cities around the US and parts of Europe. On Spotify, his song plays are hitting the millions, and there’s an overwhelming amount of requests from his Instagram followers to play in their city next. For any young, new artist like Odie, who started off making music in his bedroom in highschool, using Garageband and stolen beats from YouTube, all this poses as a pivotal turning point, setting the tone for his artistry and foretelling a promising musical career. But to Odie, this moment is really just an extension of himself and the music he’s been making all along, and the “spotlight” feels more like a false sense of reality than one would imagine. “There’s the perception of what the spotlight is, and it’s very unreal,” he tells me. “It’s the whole Atlanta thing, that people who have a lot of notoriety live a certain kind of lifestyle. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh you’re poppin now, you have this now’ and I’m like no, I’m still eating cereal three meals a day and going to school and sitting in stupid ass classes so, it’s a weird paradox.”