When you step off the plane, arrive at a new destination, and the veil of night is slowly being pulled across the sky, the new morning often feels like an experience that awakens a part of you that had been sleeping before. The night before the morning after, Burna Boy headlined Tipsy, one of Barbados’s premier soca festivals – and today, it really does feel good to feel the grass beneath your feet.
All it took was 24 hours in Bridgetown for the boy out of Port Harcourt, Nigeria to realise he dreamed of one day owning a house a stone’s throw from Rihanna’s family home on the island’s prestigious Sandy Lane. It wasn’t the palm tree-lined boulevards that swayed him, but the view out on to the vast nothingness of the Caribbean Sea. “I could really live here one day, I might have to make it happen,” he says.
It made sense as I looked out on to the ocean from his villa. Confronted with such a view, all of the meaningless things in life we worry about daily fall away like dead leaves in the autumn. Here, there are no debates about which sound Burna is inspired by or the incessant churn of the digital rumour mill. Just stillness, and a beautiful quiet.
There’s no easy way to write a profile on a man who is
