Brandy will open Flytime’s December season at the Eko Convention Centre on December 20, bringing her back to the Victoria Island hotel grounds where she sang in Nigeria for the first time, fifteen years ago.
That was October 2011, at the opening gala for the fourth season of MTN Project Fame West Africa in the Eko Hotel’s Expo Hall. The night dragged because the show was taping an episode first, and Joe had stepped in for The Game, but most of the room had come for one person. When Brandy walked out, people rushed the front of the stage. She sang four songs and went back to “I Wanna Be Down,” the single that started her career in 1994. Home in the States the next day, she tweeted that “Nigerian love will keep me smiling.”
She was back in February 2014, and that trip is where Tiwa Savage comes in.
Brandy had come to co-headline Classic FM’s Valentine’s show at the Eko with Ali Campbell of UB40, and the night before, she sat in the crowd at Darey Art-Alade’s Love Like a Movie concert to support her friend Kelly Rowland. Tiwa was on that bill, and at the press conference before her own show, Tiwa was the one Brandy kept talking about. BellaNaija reported that she compared Tiwa’s voice to a 14-year-old’s, said she planned to work with her, and promised to buy a copy of Once Upon a Time, Tiwa’s debut album, that same day.
Seven years later, they were on a record together. “Somebody’s Son,” from Tiwa’s 2021 EP Water & Garri, set Brandy’s voice beside hers on a Mystro production and went on to an NAACP Image Award nomination. Tiwa told the story from her side in a 2021 interview: after she moved to London as a child, “I Wanna Be Down” was the song that made her want to sing, and she learned by copying Brandy’s runs and ad-libs. The two later met through a mutual connection, Brandy suggested they record something, and Tiwa walked into the session with “Somebody’s Son” already written. The song Brandy went back to in that Lagos hall in 2011 is the one that first pointed Tiwa toward singing.
Tiwa has kept moving toward that sound. Her 2025 album This One Is Personal went back to the R&B she sang before she moved home to Lagos in 2011, the same year Brandy first played the Eko.
Flytime’s House of R&B night had Total and Kid Capri last December. This year it gets Brandy, and the job of opening a run of six nights that carries on through Rhythm Unplugged and Flytime Fest. Brandy is “the perfect artist to open our December season,” Flytime founder Cecil Hammond said in the announcement Billboard carried.
She reaches Lagos by way of three South African shows in Cape Town and Pretoria the week before, and Flytime has not named any guests for the 20th yet.