Reehaa on Confidence, Comparison and the Journey Back to Herself

When Reehaa speaks about this current phase of her career, there is a noticeable sense of certainty in her voice. Not the loud, performative confidence often associated with the music industry, but the kind that comes from spending years questioning yourself and finally arriving at some answers.

For the singer-songwriter, Lọ́kànmi is more than a new release. It marks what she describes as a reintroduction, a reflection of the growth, lessons, and personal changes that unfolded during a period when she wasn’t releasing her own music.

“It was a lot of time that passed and a lot of growth that had not been shown in my music,” she says. “I became independent, and a lot of things contributed to the reintroduction.”

“I had to sit with myself and know if I wanted music as bad as I said I did,” she explains. “Sometimes you think you want something, but you don’t really sit with yourself to know why you want it.”

The question wasn’t born out of a lack of passion. Rather, it came from a period where things felt stuck. Too many things seemed to be going wrong at once, and the gap between where she was and where she hoped to be felt impossible to ignore. What followed was a period of reflection that ultimately brought her back to a simple truth.

“I do want it as bad as I say I do. It’s just about timing.”

The realisation did not arrive in isolation. Part of what pushed Reehaa towards that reflection was a conversation with a friend that stayed with her long after it ended. At the time, she had been speaking admiringly online about another artist’s consistency, the constant posting, the visibility, and the effort that seemed to be paying off. Her friend responded with a simple observation: perhaps the difference was that the other artist wanted it more.

The comment struck a nerve.

“If a friend of mine thinks that I don’t want it badly enough, then maybe other people are thinking that too”

That conversation became the spark for Lọ́kànmi. The first verse and chorus came quickly, but the song itself took time. She sat with it for weeks before recording it, revisiting the ideas and trying to articulate what she had been feeling. More than anything, the song became a response to the assumption that progress always looks visible from the outside.

For Reehaa, it was a reminder that effort isn’t always public and that different artists work with different realities, resources, and timelines.

That realisation would eventually shape Lọ́kànmi, but it also revealed something else. Much of Reehaa’s recent journey has been about learning to trust herself.

That may come as a surprise to listeners who have followed her music over the years. Her songs often carry a quiet confidence, the kind that makes it easy to assume the person behind them has always been certain of who she is and what she wants.

According to Reehaa, that wasn’t always the case.

“Me portraying confidence in my music was not necessarily what was happening in my personal life,” she says. “It was just me portraying what I wanted.”

For years, confidence existed more in the music than in reality. The songs sounded sure of themselves long before she did. While listeners connected with records that felt calm and assured, she was still navigating doubt, questioning her decisions and wondering whether she was doing enough.

Over time, however, the music and the person behind it began to meet in the middle.

“It was a gradual process of me becoming confident in myself and in my music.”

Looking back, that confidence feels particularly significant because some of her biggest moments arrived before she had fully grown into it.

One of those moments was YOLO, the song that introduced many listeners to her music and gave her a level of visibility she had never experienced before.

“It was the first song that brought publicity towards me,” she says.

What followed was exciting but also overwhelming. Suddenly, there were expectations, attention and opportunities arriving all at once. At the time, she was simply trying to keep up.

“I didn’t really know what to do. I just kept rolling as everything kept coming.”

Years later, she views that period differently. The pressure was real, but so was the growth that came with it. Every stage of her career, she believes, has helped shape the artist she is becoming.

That includes the YOLO remix with Ice Prince, a collaboration she still describes as surreal. Growing up, he was one of the artists she listened to regularly, making the opportunity to share a record with him feel almost unbelievable.

“Even till today, it’s still a huge thing for me.”

That confidence became especially important during moments of burnout. Like many creatives, Reehaa reached points where the pressure, uncertainty and demands of building a music career made her question whether the journey was worth it at all.

“There were times when I felt like maybe all the stress wasn’t worth it.”

The feeling never lasted forever, but it was real enough to make her reconsider things. Looking back now, she sees those moments differently.

“It is worth it,” she says. “It took me time to realise that, but it is.”

The renewed belief didn’t just reconnect her to music; it reconnected her to the kind of music she wanted to make.

While conversations around the industry often revolve around trends, virality and commercial success, Reehaa appears increasingly comfortable following her own instincts. She admits to experimenting with more commercially driven approaches in the past but eventually realised that chasing what works for everyone else offered no guarantees.

“If there’s no guarantee either way, I’d rather do something that makes me happy.”

That philosophy extends beyond the music itself. In recent months, her visuals and online presence have taken on a stronger sense of identity. It is a shift she openly acknowledges, explaining that she only recently began paying closer attention to branding and how she presents herself as an artist.

For years, she encountered listeners who knew her songs but couldn’t connect them to her face.

“I’ve had people tell me they knew the song but didn’t know I was the one who sang it.”

Now, she is becoming more intentional about building a world around the music, one where listeners can recognise not only the songs but also the artist behind them.

The intentionality extends to the music-making process itself. Reehaa describes herself as a perfectionist, someone who can spend long periods tweaking details that other people would barely notice.

“I’m such a perfectionist when it comes to making music,” she says with a laugh.

According to her, there have been times when her producer has insisted a song is already finished while she continues searching for small things to improve. Lately, however, she has been learning an important lesson: perfection is not always about endless adjustments.

“I’m just trying to understand now that perfect also means when something is good.”

It is a mindset that mirrors much of her recent journey, learning when to trust herself, when to let go and when to accept that growth does not always require constant correction.

The conversation eventually turns to comparison, a topic that feels unavoidable in today’s music landscape. With artists constantly confronted by streaming numbers, social media metrics and viral moments, measuring personal progress against someone else’s success can quickly become a habit.

Reehaa understands that pressure.

She speaks about the tendency to see another artist’s achievements online and immediately feel the need to catch up, often without understanding the years of work that happened behind the scenes.

For her, the answer is not pretending that comparison doesn’t exist. It’s focusing on the work.

“You just have to do your best,” she says. “Once you know you’re doing your absolute best, what more can you do?”

It is a mindset that feels deeply connected to the themes that run through her music. Hope. Grace. Perseverance. Faith. The belief that difficult seasons are temporary and that growth often happens quietly before anyone else can see it.

Those are the emotions she finds herself returning to most often when she writes.

“I try to express hope, belief in God, gratitude and grace, everything that has to do with trying to be better for yourself.”

Perhaps that is why so many listeners continue to connect with her music. More than anything else, Reehaa wants people to feel understood.

The themes that appear most often in her music: hope, faith, gratitude and perseverance, are not accidental. They reflect the things she has needed herself at different points in her life.

“I hope they know they’re not alone,” she says. “I hope they feel understood.”

She hopes listeners leave her music feeling seen rather than judged, reassured rather than isolated. The goal is not to present herself as someone who has everything figured out, but as someone who understands what it feels like to be in the middle of uncertainty and keep moving forward anyway.

That perspective becomes even more poignant when she reflects on her younger self. Becoming an artist was never part of the original plan. In fact, it was a dream that only emerged after the loss of her mother, whose love for music helped shape her own relationship with sound from an early age.

“That I’m a musical artist,” she says when asked what her younger self would find hardest to believe. “I don’t think my younger self would believe that this is my reality right now.”

It’s a fitting way to think about this chapter of her career. Not as a dramatic reinvention, but as the result of years spent growing into the person and artist she hoped she could become.And perhaps that is why Lọ́kànmi feels less like a comeback and more like a reintroduction. Not because Reehaa has become someone entirely new, but because she has finally learned to trust the person she was becoming all along.

Listen to Lọ́kànmi here