Saelem Hasn’t Released His Best Song Yet

When Saelem joined the call that afternoon, he was somewhere else. Not mentally. He is present and focused, but physically somewhere else. He tells Favour Bolade, my colleague leading the conversation, that he just stepped out of wherever he was to find a quieter spot so the conversation can go on smoothly. He does not say where he was or where he is going. We know that it is somewhere in Lagos, and that is enough.

I am on the call too, mostly listening. Favour is doing the bulk of the work: asking the questions, holding the thread, and keeping things moving. For most of it, my job is to pay attention. Saelem is worth paying attention to.

Born Abraham Salem, he graduated from Unilag last year and lives alone in Lagos, with no 9-to-5, no plan B, and no real intention of getting either. The plan, best I can tell from the hour we spent with him, is Afro-gospel music. The plan, against the kind of odds that would have put off most people in his position, appears to be working.

Salem, Saelem’s real name, he explains when Favour asks, means peace. It is a name from the Bible. In 2022, when he wanted to put his music on streaming platforms for the first time, the name was already taken. So he added an “e” after the “a” to form Saelem. Same meaning, same name, different spelling. He explains this the way you would explain a fix for a small problem, which is exactly what it was.

Saelem has been singing since he was eight. He started playing instruments as a teenager: keyboard, guitar, drums. But for him, the thing that truly mattered, the thing that made music feel like something more than a church activity, was writing. Back then, he would write a song, then go find his mother and sing it to her. She would cheer. He would believe her completely. “Though now,” Saelem explained, “looking back, it was quite… it was not as good, but my mum was my biggest supporter. Her support gave me the boldness to keep writing.” He doesn’t say this with discomfiture but with the warmth of someone who understood early that encouragement, given again and again, is a kind of infrastructure.

For a while Saelem did not want to do gospel music. Gospel music as he found it growing up was, in his own words, one-directional. Someone would take a verse, sing it for ten minutes, and maybe speak in tongues. Then it was done. He felt that there was no creativity in it. So he told his parents he was not going that route and released a couple of secular songs instead. “Secular, not worldly,” he carefully notes, because there is a difference. “Music you could play at any event, learn something from, just not gospel.”

Then in 2023 something changed. Saelem describes it as an encounter with God. He does not say much about what it looked like. Neither Favour nor I pushed. What matters is what came out of it: Saelem felt, without any doubt, that he was supposed to use his gift to serve. “I felt God tell me to use my gift to serve Him,” he said. “That was a turnaround for me.” Saelem has not looked back since then, even though he has brought everything along with him, including the restlessness, the refusal to stay in one lane and the itch to do things a different way.

Saelem’s music now sits between Afrobeats, EDM and R&B. When asked which pulls hardest, he doesn’t pause before saying “Afrobeats”. Saelem loves Afro fusion, and he is proud to be an Afro artist.

I stepped in at this point in the conversation. I have been following a debate running around the internet for months. Who owns Afrobeats, whether it is a Nigerian genre or a wider continental one, and whether Tyla’s Grammy win in the category was fair. I want to know where Saelem stands, but he is not particularly drawn to the argument. To him, the sub-genres Afro-soul, Afro-rave, and Afro-rock are Afrobeats’ children, not its rivals. On the Tyla question, if she sang an Afrobeats song and won for it, Saelem sees no problem. He points out that Nigerians win awards in Amapiano and R&B despite these genres not being traditionally Nigerian either. You can do well in a genre without owning it. He says this with the calm of a man who has settled the matter and moved on, and we move on with him.

Saelem’s main producer is Jethro. They have worked together since 2022. The story of how that partnership began involves a management set-up, a fight over a song and then a moment of clear thinking where Saelem asked, in plain terms, what exactly they were fighting about, given that neither of them was anything much yet. Jethro agreed that fighting was not worth it. They have been closer ever since.

For some time, the studio was Jethro’s bedroom. Just the two of them working together day and night to make music. Saelem preferred it that way. Extra people in the room, he felt, got in the way of his creativity and his inspiration. Then Icon, the owner of the Iconic Stuff record label which he will later get signed into, came along and told him something that shifted things: “You have sound. You have delivery. You can write. You are just not clinical yet.” That note, not clinical landed with some profound effect. Saelem began opening up the room to more people. Now he says he cannot record without the team around him: Icon; Chibuna, Saelem’s manager, who follows him day to day; Jethro; and whoever else is part of the process at that time. The bedroom studio has become, in spirit, something bigger.

When Favour asked Saelem about his creative process, he explained that every song starts with prayer. “Always prayer first,” he added, and I’m not surprised. Then the song’s tune comes to him. If it doesn’t come, he sometimes searches for it in the beats Jethro has made. After settling on the tune, he begins writing. When he is finished writing, he prays again.

His ritual before a show includes taking enough water, something minty and no food until the set is done. Saelem is careful about the body as an instrument. To him, these things are not habits built on luck. They are a system.

Painkiller, Saelem’s current most-streamed track, was written during what he describes with quiet calm as a hard season.

He had just finished at Unilag and was on his own in Lagos, away from his parents. There was no money. He was trying to get through each day. Afro-gospel music was not bringing in income. Then a girl he liked gave him, in his own words, a great fat breakfast. He meant this as a metaphor, as is common in Nigerian lingo and as made popular by the Burnaboy song.

Saelem was going to quit. Get a job so that he can simply survive, and music would become a side thing, something he did on weekends, something he had tried and left behind. “I was quitting music,” Saelem recollects. “Everything was going wrong. Then I wrote Painkiller.”

Yours Truly came from a different place entirely, a remembrance of who Saelem was before Jesus. Finished is an Easter song, built around the moment Jesus Christ said on the cross that it is finished. Three songs. Three seasons. Saelem does not mix them up. He holds the emotional address of each moment in his own catalogue.

When Favour asks whether there are songs Saelem feels people are not paying enough attention to, he names Lately and Main Character. Main Character was his first song. Lately was written just after Icon reached out to offer management. Both carry a weight that the streaming numbers have not yet caught up to.

Saelem is currently reading Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. He described it as the story of a man who started with nothing and worked his way up to become someone his country could be proud of. Similar to the story of Saelem’s father who fled Kogi State at the age of seventeen with nothing but a nylon bag and no plan. He told his father he was heading to Lagos, rode buses across the nation, and arrived with no idea what he would find there, only knowing that staying was not an option. He worked his way up and established a family.

As Saelem narrates this story, you can tell it is one he has held for a long time and plans to keep.

For fun, Saelem plays FIFA on PS5. He is open to one-v-ones and confident he’ll win. We even brought it up with him, asking whether he was sure he could beat us, and he said maybe, but he has not seen either of us play, so he’s not sure.

Saelem does not have a side gig. He does not have a 9-to-5. But he is dedicated to the craft of music creation, so much so that he sleeps in the studio sometimes, seven days straight or more. Saelem does not present this as a sacrifice or something hard to carry. He presents it as the deal he made with himself, and he is at peace with it. “Music is all I do,” Saelem said. “Music is all I want to be successful at, physically, financially.”

Saelem turned another year older recently. On his birthday, the messages came in. DMs, comments. From people saying he had helped them get closer to God. He mentions that he preaches at his church. He ministers, and people encounter his life as they encounter his music, and for now, by his own design, the two things are the same thing.

When I mentioned that someone in the comments called Saelem the future of gospel music: “I am not the future,” he corrects the timeline without missing a beat. “I am the now of Afro-gospel. And I am only looking for God’s approval.” Saelem says it without any pride, the way you state a direction, not a boast.

He doesn’t assure us, but he hinted that an album might come before the year ends. He stated that he has enough recorded material to release a song a day for the next four years. He also added that he has not released his best song yet. You can tell he has said it before, and means it the same way every time.

He is still working through the breakfast. You remember, the one from earlier? Lagos, he observes with the weary clarity of a recent graduate, is not kind to men who are not yet made. He is not yet made, by his own measure, though the gap between where he is and where he is going is closing faster than he expected. “For now,” he says, “I am looking unto Jesus.” This is both a statement of faith and, one suspects, a decision about where he puts his attention.

Somewhere during all of this, the call wraps up. Saelem is warm on the way out. He has places to be. He sounds like a man who decided, at some point not long ago, that there is no time to waste on a Tuesday. Or any other day.