Joey B keeps winning by losing

Twelve years after "Tonga," the polyglot Accra-and-New-York-based artist and self-producer is still mixing his own vocals at midnight and chasing the one listener who's never heard of him.
Joey B stands shirtless beside a doorway hung with a yellow beaded curtain, one hand raised to the back of his head, looking down and away from the camera. He wears silver-framed sunglasses, brown linen trousers, and a gold bracelet. A horse tattoo sits on his chest and further tattoos run along his raised arm.

Summer gets to be the sexy season by default, sure, but nobody said it gets to keep the title. Sexy Highlife, the EP Joey B released this June, is a summer record by temperament and a year-rounder by nature.

He wants no part of his own launch party, though, and when we catch him on a call (his format of choice: “this whole typing, I no dey fit”), the EP has been out for a few days, and instead of taking the weekend off to let his friends buy him a drink, he’s already back on Logic mixing vocals for something else.

“As we’re on the phone now, if it was a video, I’ll show you,” he says, thrilled at the idea of the evidence. “I’m on Logic right now, just mixing vocals.”

He isn’t precious about what that says about him. “I don’t even want to use the word addicted, because I don’t know what it is,” he admits with an easy laugh. “I think I’ve become like a workaholic.”

Joey B sits on a red wooden stool outside a teal chop bar, hands resting on his thighs, sunglasses on. White shirt, brown trousers, black loafers. Behind him the window is covered in food stickers and photographs of rice dishes, with a citrus-print counter running beneath it.
Photography: Emily Brownett

He brings the studio credits to back it up. “What you guys don’t know is that I produce, I mix, master, all of my stuff,” he says. “I mixed, mastered, co-produced like 95 percent, at least 90 to 95 percent. So it wasn’t just producers sending me beats.”

“I don’t even want to use the word addicted, because I don’t know what it is.”

Downtime has never held much appeal for the polyglot Accra-born rapper, who broke out in 2014 with “Tonga,” became Adidas’s first African brand ambassador a year later, and raps in five languages (English, Ga, Twi, Fante, Pidgin, if you were wondering) while mixing his own records for fun. Release week in his world is just another day at the desk, but after a deeply private stretch away from the spotlight, we’re just thrilled he’s ready to let us hear what he has been working through.

The secret is Sexy Highlife wasn’t supposed to be next. Joey already had other records open and other plans he’d rather keep to himself for now (“I don’t even want to go there with you”), and left to his own devices he probably would’ve kept tinkering with them a while longer.

“Normally when I’m creating my body of works, I try to be in a world, like a bubble,” he says, and his opening plan for the year involved staying in it. “Initially I just wanted to drop singles. Drop and disappear, drop and disappear type of thing.”

Joey B sits alone in a red metal chair against a purple door, one leg crossed, hand to his sunglasses. He wears a white button-down and dark brown trousers. The chop bar around him is painted in blocks of blue, green and cream, with two tables in fruit-print oilcloth and a curtain of yellow beads over the doorway. Artificial turf covers the ground.

What got him out of the bubble was his close friend Albert Donkor, better known as Trebla, who could hear a project in the singles Joey kept releasing one at a time and came back with the same very fair reminder: fans were waiting, and Joey already had the songs.

“Trebla just put a battery in my back like, you’ve got to go,” Joey says. “Wake up. You can do it. You are able to literally do anything.”

He hands over the credit happily, and he’ll tell you exactly what Trebla supplies, which is a relationship with time that Joey has yet to be able to manage on his own. “God definitely put him right here to speed me up,” he says. “I have my own world, I have my own pace, I have my own timing. He works with perfection when it comes to timing. I don’t have that.”

“Trebla just put a battery in my back like, you’ve got to go.”

They weren’t always close enough for that kind of push, and what changed the friendship was a song Joey had already written off as a dud. “Me and Trebla, it was almost more like acquaintances,” he says. “He sees me, sees me, that’s it. But it was just that one song that made him push this whole thing, which was ‘Princess.'”

A 2024 freestyle, dropped after a long stretch of releasing nothing, and Joey had shelved it in his own head before anybody else had even heard it. “It was so unplanned,” he says. “It was me coming back into the game after a while of not releasing anything. That’s the one I did not look at, that’s the one I thought was a failure.”

Trebla heard what was in there before Joey did, and the numbers ended up proving him right. “But that’s the one that really did well.”

The title was a casual lightbulb moment for an artist who swears he isn’t trying to invent anything new. “I’m from Ghana, we have Highlife, it’s one of our biggest exports,” Joey says, laying out the math like it’s obvious. “How do I make it sexy? So I’m like, wait. Sexy Highlife.” He brushes off any attempt to crown him a pioneer, maintaining that the name is just him putting heavy emphasis on the vibe.

Joey splits his time between Accra and New York, and you can hear that commute all over the tracklist. That transatlantic exchange is loudest on tracks like “Montecarlo” and “Exopa” (named after the premium Ghanaian modeling agency).

The inspiration hit a peak thanks to an absurdly timed run-in: Joey was playing Cash Cobain on the way to a King Promise after-party when he looked up and saw Cash Cobain standing on the street. He tapped him to say what’s up, passing on the usual fan photo request, chalking the wild timing up to the universe doing A&R.

“To me it felt very like a spiritual moment, because I’m like, damn, what you’re doing, you’re on the right path,” he says. “‘Princess’ didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, so if I didn’t go to New York and really listen to Cash Cobain as often, I wouldn’t have had the proper way of producing it.”

Getting that one right opened the gates for the rest. “It kind of started a whole, like, okay, I can do ‘Suzzy Williams,’ I can do ‘Yaa Brefi.'”

As for what came out the other end, he’s protective over how the internet categorizes it. “It’s not a Ghanaian sound, but there’s some Ghanaian elements in there,” he explains. “It’s just me merging what I learned in New York from Cash Cobain and putting it into Highlife”.

Pulling that off in the booth was another story. Because Joey handles his own mixing and mastering, he hears a record from the inside out. “Montecarlo” leans into Zouk and relies on Monomite’s live production style, which forced Joey to twist his vocal delivery to keep up. “I had to use a certain tone of voice that was a bit not Joey B,” he admits. “Going up like all of that, it’s not a joke”.

He and Cash still talk, DMs going back and forth across the Atlantic like pen pals who happen to make bangers. “I’m all the way in Ghana adding to something he started in America,” Joey says. “That’s the beauty of it.”

And Cash is far from the only name lighting up his notifications. Since “Exopa” and “Montecarlo,” international artists have come knocking, and Joey will happily tell you it wasn’t the safe, straight-down-the-middle record that did it. “Not because of ‘Akosua Broni,'” he says. “Because of ‘Exopa’ and ‘Montecarlo.'”

“I’m all the way in Ghana adding to something he started in America. That’s the beauty of it.”

For Joey, that’s his strategy in a sentence. “You’re selling originality,” he says. “You’re selling: where is this coming from?”

When it came time to bring Odunsi onto the track, letting the Nigerian star turn in a standard feature verse would have been the obvious move. Joey wrote and sang the chorus himself instead, then sent it over with one condition.

“Do it in Twi,” he says. “Because I want them to hear ‘Exopa’ and think, this is Zouk or this is Kompa, but where is it coming from? What language is this? Oh, he’s Ghanaian.”

He wasn’t always this evangelical about Highlife, though. Back when he was a kid, his dad had a habit of switching the aux from hip-hop mid-flow, a betrayal on the order of someone killing the lights at your party. “When I was young and my dad would switch from hip-hop to Highlife, I got upset,” he says. “Why are you changing the mood?”

He came around, of course, the way everyone eventually turns into their parents whether they like it or not. “It takes maturity and growth to accept and understand what Highlife is,” he says. “It’s rich. It’s like palm wine. When you mature, you feel it.”

“It’s rich. It’s like palm wine. When you mature, you feel it.”

The crowd showing up for Sexy Highlife skews young, and Joey has no illusions about what’s drawing them. “They enjoy it because I’m infusing trap and new generation sounds into it,” he says. “If I didn’t do that, they wouldn’t care.”

He’ll admit that stings a bit, a purist watching listeners arrive for the trap and the newness rather than the Highlife he’d frame and hang on a wall if he could. “That hurts a little, because Highlife is pure,” he says. But it’s a trade he’s happy to make, because the trap gets them curious, and the Highlife is what makes them stay.

When the industry constantly pressures local sounds to morph into the next massive Afrobeats crossover, Joey offers a much calmer perspective. He doesn’t think his native sound needs to chase anyone else’s tail.

“Tapping into what’s happening in the world is not bad,” he says. “But just adding yours to what’s happening, that should be the ultimate goal.”

He’s nowhere near finished experimenting with the genre. He points to his Pappy Kojo collaboration “Greetings From Abroad” as his first attempt at Borga Highlife, the synth-heavy strain Ghanaians in 1980s Germany built out of highlife, disco, and funk, and he’s eager to push the boundaries further.

“I can go really deep, very extreme, authentic ones, and still sound fresh somehow,” he says.

For anyone trying to follow his lead, his best advice has nothing to do with finding the perfect snare or synth. (In a music business that exhausts young artists by begging for viral dances, telling newcomers to protect their peace and forget the numbers is a charming rebellion.)

“Don’t make music according to streaming and according to TikToks,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you have five plays. One out of the five could change your life.”

Handling your own production means you have unlimited hours to talk yourself out of a good song. Joey B knows this trap well, since he mixes and co-produces almost all of his catalog. He nearly trashed an unreleased cut just because he blew out the audio on the initial vocal take. “I didn’t really check the mic, the microphone volume level, all of that, so it was blasting,” he says.

Calling a friend to salvage the mix was a dead end, leaving his creative breakthrough for a mundane grocery run. “Yesterday I was going to buy bread and egg and I was playing it back and I’m like, wait, I think I was overthinking it,” he says. His business partner Jeremy handed down the final ruling on the track. “He’s like, no, this is great. You’re overthinking it”.

You’d be hard pressed to find Joey B in a hurry, even when he’s holding onto a verse from a Highlife heavyweight. He originally tapped Bisa K’dei for a hit of nostalgia—”I want that, like the old Bisa,” he says, requesting “those your ‘Chingam’ days”—and then let the files marinate for good measure while ping-ponging between Accra and New York.

The delay became a running joke between the two of them. “He’d always say, ‘Wo dier dabiaa saa nanso won release’ (something roughly to the effect of: you always say that, but you never release it) and I’m like, oh, I’m going to do it,” Joey says. “But I just like, you know, time”.

When Joey finally faced the music, there wasn’t any. Literally. “He lost the beat, like he lost the beat to that record,” Joey explains. “He also lost his vocals to that. So he came to my apartment, then we re-recorded all of that. It had the same feel, but not necessarily the same feel like the early one,” he admits.

The impromptu living-room reboot meant Joey had to step back up to the mic and recut his own vocals just to match Bisa’s newfound cadence. It was an imperfect, completely unorthodox way to get the track across the finish line, and he ultimately credits Trebla for making sure it actually saw the light of day. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t care about all of these records, honestly”.

The easiest route to a guaranteed hit on a project is packing the tracklist with established superstars. For his 2017 EP, Darryl, Joey B sat out the numbers game, and instead of chasing a radio smash, he passed the mic to a roster of underground names: DarkoVibes, $pacely, KiddBlack, and a then-unknown Odunsi (who turns up again on the track “Exopa” nine years later, meaning Joey either has fierce creative loyalty or just a really, really long memory). It’s the kind of stubborn, visionary leap you can expect from a Leo sign, but he insists the choice was purely about the music.

“Do you think if I was thinking about numbers, wouldn’t I feature the likes of the Shattas and the Stonebwoys?” he asks. “But no, I didn’t do that. I wanted to amplify the culture… I put people that the industry wasn’t familiar with.”

His inner circle didn’t see the vision right away, expressing their doubts through a few well-placed subtweets. (He still remembers the betrayal almost a decade later, which is a level of dedication we can only respect.)

“Even close friends, back then on Twitter, they subbed me a little,” he says. “Like, don’t expect to go against the greats and think it will be successful. Basically telling you it’s trash.”

“Making radio songs. No. I don’t play that.”

Three months later, when La Même Gang dropped La Même Tape and took over Accra’s underground, Joey’s supposedly misguided bet ended up looking more like a premonition, and he’s well aware of this fact.

“Darryl birthed stables,” he says, and he’s more than entitled to the victory lap.

The ordeal cured him of worrying about local metrics. “Going against the grain, making radio songs. No. I don’t play that,” he says. His focus has zoomed out, leaving regional expectations behind in favor of chasing something borderless. “That’s the reason why you guys don’t even see me on Ghana radio.”

Instead, his ideal listener is someone who’s never heard of him. “I want a random person in Rwanda. I want a random person in Czech somewhere to just randomly go on Spotify or Apple Music and find my music,” he says. “Like, what’s this guy saying? And then it’s like, oh, damn. What can I learn from this? That’s what I’m looking for.”

Joey B sits on a wooden stool under a large tree with two young children, one held in his arm and the other seated on his knee. He is shirtless in dark brown trousers and sunglasses, looking into the camera. The younger child wears an orange tee, the older one a red and navy zip-up jacket with plaid shorts. Behind them, a yellow bungalow and a water tower stand against a teal sky.

The analytics are available to Joey B at any hour, and he’d much rather have the numbers he gets in the aisles at MaxMart, somewhere between the produce and the frozen goods. “I go to MaxMart to do groceries, people are walking up to me,” he says, and nobody, naturally, is stopping him by the freezers to ask about his monthly listeners. What they want to talk about is a song of his that got them through a hard stretch.

Better yet, he’d like you to go looking through his commercial duds. (He assigns this homework mid-call, so consider yourself enrolled.) “If you go and check Joey B songs and see which one is the least in terms of metrics, maybe that’s the one that inspired somebody to be a whole new artist,” he says. “That’s a win right there.”

He has proof, obviously: he’d written “Princess” off as a lost cause, and it’s the reason there’s an EP at all.

You’d expect a certain amount of retroactive spin at this point, Joey recasting his misses as secret wins, but he goes considerably (and delightfully) further than that. “I’ve come to love the art of failing,” he says. “People don’t understand that the more you fail, that’s the actual win. So I just want to make so many mistakes, because I’m so open to making a lot of mistakes. At the end of the day, I want to look back and be like, what did I learn from this failure? That’s my main goal right now.”

“I’ve come to love the art of failing. People don’t understand that the more you fail, that’s the actual win.”

Joey B may make a gospel record one day, though the genre’s current class should probably brace itself. “I don’t even do like the generic ones that we know,” he says, before delivering the verdict flat: “I also feel like gospel music has fallen off.”

His benchmark is the gospel he grew up with, the kind that could interrupt a Wu-Tang listening session and have a pack of rap-obsessed kids suddenly considering worship. (A difficult sell under most circumstances.) “You either really feel like, OK, I want to worship, or you just really love the melodies,” he says.

The singing may be impressive, but he is suspicious of what all that range is working toward. “Now the gospel, honestly, it sounds like, yeah, I know how to sing. I can sing and worship God and I can make some money out of it,” he says. “But that’s not supposed to be the goal. The goal is supposed to be you winning souls, you know, not just the streaming of it.”

Any future gospel record would have to draw from the lessons and failures he’s been circling throughout our call. “I’ll definitely want to make it very pure, like coming from the heart,” he says. “Coming from lessons, coming from failure.”

The version of Joey B on the other end of the call is still keeping a few chapters to himself. When the conversation reaches the things he would never do today, he begins to answer, then catches himself. “There’s so many things I used to do back then, but I look at it today and just like, oh, I can’t. It’s not even me,” he says.

The full explanation, he warns, would require at least two hours. For now, he only hopes that when he tells it, we’ll be there to witness it.

Before we hang up, Joey offers us a review of our own. This is our first encounter, but he says we “seem very cool,” adding, helpfully, that he likes cool people. Then, after gospel, Highlife, streaming numbers, and failure have all had their turn, he leaves us with one more thing: “Culture will always win, in my opinion.”

Written by: HQ

Interview by: Cyril Senason

Photography: Emily Brownett

Creative Direction: Supreme Eleblu

Summer gets to be the sexy season by default, sure, but nobody said it gets to keep the title. Sexy Highlife, the EP Joey B released this June, is a summer record by temperament and a year-rounder by nature.

He wants no part of his own launch party, though, and when we catch him on a call (his format of choice: “this whole typing, I no dey fit”), the EP has been out for a few days, and instead of taking the weekend off to let his friends buy him a drink, he’s already back on Logic mixing vocals for something else.

“As we’re on the phone now, if it was a video, I’ll show you,” he says, thrilled at the idea of the evidence. “I’m on Logic right now, just mixing vocals.”

He isn’t precious about what that says about him. “I don’t even want to use the word addicted, because I don’t know what it is,” he admits with an easy laugh. “I think I’ve become like a workaholic.”

Joey B sits on a red wooden stool outside a teal chop bar, hands resting on his thighs, sunglasses on. White shirt, brown trousers, black loafers. Behind him the window is covered in food stickers and photographs of rice dishes, with a citrus-print counter running beneath it.
Photography: Emily Brownett

He brings the studio credits to back it up. “What you guys don’t know is that I produce, I mix, master, all of my stuff,” he says. “I mixed, mastered, co-produced like 95 percent, at least 90 to 95 percent. So it wasn’t just producers sending me beats.”

“I don’t even want to use the word addicted, because I don’t know what it is.”

Downtime has never held much appeal for the polyglot Accra-born rapper, who broke out in 2014 with “Tonga,” became Adidas’s first African brand ambassador a year later, and raps in five languages (English, Ga, Twi, Fante, Pidgin, if you were wondering) while mixing his own records for fun. Release week in his world is just another day at the desk, but after a deeply private stretch away from the spotlight, we’re just thrilled he’s ready to let us hear what he has been working through.

The secret is Sexy Highlife wasn’t supposed to be next. Joey already had other records open and other plans he’d rather keep to himself for now (“I don’t even want to go there with you”), and left to his own devices he probably would’ve kept tinkering with them a while longer.

“Normally when I’m creating my body of works, I try to be in a world, like a bubble,” he says, and his opening plan for the year involved staying in it. “Initially I just wanted to drop singles. Drop and disappear, drop and disappear type of thing.”

Joey B sits alone in a red metal chair against a purple door, one leg crossed, hand to his sunglasses. He wears a white button-down and dark brown trousers. The chop bar around him is painted in blocks of blue, green and cream, with two tables in fruit-print oilcloth and a curtain of yellow beads over the doorway. Artificial turf covers the ground.

What got him out of the bubble was his close friend Albert Donkor, better known as Trebla, who could hear a project in the singles Joey kept releasing one at a time and came back with the same very fair reminder: fans were waiting, and Joey already had the songs.

“Trebla just put a battery in my back like, you’ve got to go,” Joey says. “Wake up. You can do it. You are able to literally do anything.”

He hands over the credit happily, and he’ll tell you exactly what Trebla supplies, which is a relationship with time that Joey has yet to be able to manage on his own. “God definitely put him right here to speed me up,” he says. “I have my own world, I have my own pace, I have my own timing. He works with perfection when it comes to timing. I don’t have that.”

“Trebla just put a battery in my back like, you’ve got to go.”

They weren’t always close enough for that kind of push, and what changed the friendship was a song Joey had already written off as a dud. “Me and Trebla, it was almost more like acquaintances,” he says. “He sees me, sees me, that’s it. But it was just that one song that made him push this whole thing, which was ‘Princess.'”

A 2024 freestyle, dropped after a long stretch of releasing nothing, and Joey had shelved it in his own head before anybody else had even heard it. “It was so unplanned,” he says. “It was me coming back into the game after a while of not releasing anything. That’s the one I did not look at, that’s the one I thought was a failure.”

Trebla heard what was in there before Joey did, and the numbers ended up proving him right. “But that’s the one that really did well.”

The title was a casual lightbulb moment for an artist who swears he isn’t trying to invent anything new. “I’m from Ghana, we have Highlife, it’s one of our biggest exports,” Joey says, laying out the math like it’s obvious. “How do I make it sexy? So I’m like, wait. Sexy Highlife.” He brushes off any attempt to crown him a pioneer, maintaining that the name is just him putting heavy emphasis on the vibe.

Joey splits his time between Accra and New York, and you can hear that commute all over the tracklist. That transatlantic exchange is loudest on tracks like “Montecarlo” and “Exopa” (named after the premium Ghanaian modeling agency).

The inspiration hit a peak thanks to an absurdly timed run-in: Joey was playing Cash Cobain on the way to a King Promise after-party when he looked up and saw Cash Cobain standing on the street. He tapped him to say what’s up, passing on the usual fan photo request, chalking the wild timing up to the universe doing A&R.

“To me it felt very like a spiritual moment, because I’m like, damn, what you’re doing, you’re on the right path,” he says. “‘Princess’ didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, so if I didn’t go to New York and really listen to Cash Cobain as often, I wouldn’t have had the proper way of producing it.”

Getting that one right opened the gates for the rest. “It kind of started a whole, like, okay, I can do ‘Suzzy Williams,’ I can do ‘Yaa Brefi.'”

As for what came out the other end, he’s protective over how the internet categorizes it. “It’s not a Ghanaian sound, but there’s some Ghanaian elements in there,” he explains. “It’s just me merging what I learned in New York from Cash Cobain and putting it into Highlife”.

Pulling that off in the booth was another story. Because Joey handles his own mixing and mastering, he hears a record from the inside out. “Montecarlo” leans into Zouk and relies on Monomite’s live production style, which forced Joey to twist his vocal delivery to keep up. “I had to use a certain tone of voice that was a bit not Joey B,” he admits. “Going up like all of that, it’s not a joke”.

He and Cash still talk, DMs going back and forth across the Atlantic like pen pals who happen to make bangers. “I’m all the way in Ghana adding to something he started in America,” Joey says. “That’s the beauty of it.”

And Cash is far from the only name lighting up his notifications. Since “Exopa” and “Montecarlo,” international artists have come knocking, and Joey will happily tell you it wasn’t the safe, straight-down-the-middle record that did it. “Not because of ‘Akosua Broni,'” he says. “Because of ‘Exopa’ and ‘Montecarlo.'”

“I’m all the way in Ghana adding to something he started in America. That’s the beauty of it.”

For Joey, that’s his strategy in a sentence. “You’re selling originality,” he says. “You’re selling: where is this coming from?”

When it came time to bring Odunsi onto the track, letting the Nigerian star turn in a standard feature verse would have been the obvious move. Joey wrote and sang the chorus himself instead, then sent it over with one condition.

“Do it in Twi,” he says. “Because I want them to hear ‘Exopa’ and think, this is Zouk or this is Kompa, but where is it coming from? What language is this? Oh, he’s Ghanaian.”

He wasn’t always this evangelical about Highlife, though. Back when he was a kid, his dad had a habit of switching the aux from hip-hop mid-flow, a betrayal on the order of someone killing the lights at your party. “When I was young and my dad would switch from hip-hop to Highlife, I got upset,” he says. “Why are you changing the mood?”

He came around, of course, the way everyone eventually turns into their parents whether they like it or not. “It takes maturity and growth to accept and understand what Highlife is,” he says. “It’s rich. It’s like palm wine. When you mature, you feel it.”

“It’s rich. It’s like palm wine. When you mature, you feel it.”

The crowd showing up for Sexy Highlife skews young, and Joey has no illusions about what’s drawing them. “They enjoy it because I’m infusing trap and new generation sounds into it,” he says. “If I didn’t do that, they wouldn’t care.”

He’ll admit that stings a bit, a purist watching listeners arrive for the trap and the newness rather than the Highlife he’d frame and hang on a wall if he could. “That hurts a little, because Highlife is pure,” he says. But it’s a trade he’s happy to make, because the trap gets them curious, and the Highlife is what makes them stay.

When the industry constantly pressures local sounds to morph into the next massive Afrobeats crossover, Joey offers a much calmer perspective. He doesn’t think his native sound needs to chase anyone else’s tail.

“Tapping into what’s happening in the world is not bad,” he says. “But just adding yours to what’s happening, that should be the ultimate goal.”

He’s nowhere near finished experimenting with the genre. He points to his Pappy Kojo collaboration “Greetings From Abroad” as his first attempt at Borga Highlife, the synth-heavy strain Ghanaians in 1980s Germany built out of highlife, disco, and funk, and he’s eager to push the boundaries further.

“I can go really deep, very extreme, authentic ones, and still sound fresh somehow,” he says.

For anyone trying to follow his lead, his best advice has nothing to do with finding the perfect snare or synth. (In a music business that exhausts young artists by begging for viral dances, telling newcomers to protect their peace and forget the numbers is a charming rebellion.)

“Don’t make music according to streaming and according to TikToks,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you have five plays. One out of the five could change your life.”

Handling your own production means you have unlimited hours to talk yourself out of a good song. Joey B knows this trap well, since he mixes and co-produces almost all of his catalog. He nearly trashed an unreleased cut just because he blew out the audio on the initial vocal take. “I didn’t really check the mic, the microphone volume level, all of that, so it was blasting,” he says.

Calling a friend to salvage the mix was a dead end, leaving his creative breakthrough for a mundane grocery run. “Yesterday I was going to buy bread and egg and I was playing it back and I’m like, wait, I think I was overthinking it,” he says. His business partner Jeremy handed down the final ruling on the track. “He’s like, no, this is great. You’re overthinking it”.

You’d be hard pressed to find Joey B in a hurry, even when he’s holding onto a verse from a Highlife heavyweight. He originally tapped Bisa K’dei for a hit of nostalgia—”I want that, like the old Bisa,” he says, requesting “those your ‘Chingam’ days”—and then let the files marinate for good measure while ping-ponging between Accra and New York.

The delay became a running joke between the two of them. “He’d always say, ‘Wo dier dabiaa saa nanso won release’ (something roughly to the effect of: you always say that, but you never release it) and I’m like, oh, I’m going to do it,” Joey says. “But I just like, you know, time”.

When Joey finally faced the music, there wasn’t any. Literally. “He lost the beat, like he lost the beat to that record,” Joey explains. “He also lost his vocals to that. So he came to my apartment, then we re-recorded all of that. It had the same feel, but not necessarily the same feel like the early one,” he admits.

The impromptu living-room reboot meant Joey had to step back up to the mic and recut his own vocals just to match Bisa’s newfound cadence. It was an imperfect, completely unorthodox way to get the track across the finish line, and he ultimately credits Trebla for making sure it actually saw the light of day. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t care about all of these records, honestly”.

The easiest route to a guaranteed hit on a project is packing the tracklist with established superstars. For his 2017 EP, Darryl, Joey B sat out the numbers game, and instead of chasing a radio smash, he passed the mic to a roster of underground names: DarkoVibes, $pacely, KiddBlack, and a then-unknown Odunsi (who turns up again on the track “Exopa” nine years later, meaning Joey either has fierce creative loyalty or just a really, really long memory). It’s the kind of stubborn, visionary leap you can expect from a Leo sign, but he insists the choice was purely about the music.

“Do you think if I was thinking about numbers, wouldn’t I feature the likes of the Shattas and the Stonebwoys?” he asks. “But no, I didn’t do that. I wanted to amplify the culture… I put people that the industry wasn’t familiar with.”

His inner circle didn’t see the vision right away, expressing their doubts through a few well-placed subtweets. (He still remembers the betrayal almost a decade later, which is a level of dedication we can only respect.)

“Even close friends, back then on Twitter, they subbed me a little,” he says. “Like, don’t expect to go against the greats and think it will be successful. Basically telling you it’s trash.”

“Making radio songs. No. I don’t play that.”

Three months later, when La Même Gang dropped La Même Tape and took over Accra’s underground, Joey’s supposedly misguided bet ended up looking more like a premonition, and he’s well aware of this fact.

“Darryl birthed stables,” he says, and he’s more than entitled to the victory lap.

The ordeal cured him of worrying about local metrics. “Going against the grain, making radio songs. No. I don’t play that,” he says. His focus has zoomed out, leaving regional expectations behind in favor of chasing something borderless. “That’s the reason why you guys don’t even see me on Ghana radio.”

Instead, his ideal listener is someone who’s never heard of him. “I want a random person in Rwanda. I want a random person in Czech somewhere to just randomly go on Spotify or Apple Music and find my music,” he says. “Like, what’s this guy saying? And then it’s like, oh, damn. What can I learn from this? That’s what I’m looking for.”

Joey B sits on a wooden stool under a large tree with two young children, one held in his arm and the other seated on his knee. He is shirtless in dark brown trousers and sunglasses, looking into the camera. The younger child wears an orange tee, the older one a red and navy zip-up jacket with plaid shorts. Behind them, a yellow bungalow and a water tower stand against a teal sky.

The analytics are available to Joey B at any hour, and he’d much rather have the numbers he gets in the aisles at MaxMart, somewhere between the produce and the frozen goods. “I go to MaxMart to do groceries, people are walking up to me,” he says, and nobody, naturally, is stopping him by the freezers to ask about his monthly listeners. What they want to talk about is a song of his that got them through a hard stretch.

Better yet, he’d like you to go looking through his commercial duds. (He assigns this homework mid-call, so consider yourself enrolled.) “If you go and check Joey B songs and see which one is the least in terms of metrics, maybe that’s the one that inspired somebody to be a whole new artist,” he says. “That’s a win right there.”

He has proof, obviously: he’d written “Princess” off as a lost cause, and it’s the reason there’s an EP at all.

You’d expect a certain amount of retroactive spin at this point, Joey recasting his misses as secret wins, but he goes considerably (and delightfully) further than that. “I’ve come to love the art of failing,” he says. “People don’t understand that the more you fail, that’s the actual win. So I just want to make so many mistakes, because I’m so open to making a lot of mistakes. At the end of the day, I want to look back and be like, what did I learn from this failure? That’s my main goal right now.”

“I’ve come to love the art of failing. People don’t understand that the more you fail, that’s the actual win.”

Joey B may make a gospel record one day, though the genre’s current class should probably brace itself. “I don’t even do like the generic ones that we know,” he says, before delivering the verdict flat: “I also feel like gospel music has fallen off.”

His benchmark is the gospel he grew up with, the kind that could interrupt a Wu-Tang listening session and have a pack of rap-obsessed kids suddenly considering worship. (A difficult sell under most circumstances.) “You either really feel like, OK, I want to worship, or you just really love the melodies,” he says.

The singing may be impressive, but he is suspicious of what all that range is working toward. “Now the gospel, honestly, it sounds like, yeah, I know how to sing. I can sing and worship God and I can make some money out of it,” he says. “But that’s not supposed to be the goal. The goal is supposed to be you winning souls, you know, not just the streaming of it.”

Any future gospel record would have to draw from the lessons and failures he’s been circling throughout our call. “I’ll definitely want to make it very pure, like coming from the heart,” he says. “Coming from lessons, coming from failure.”

The version of Joey B on the other end of the call is still keeping a few chapters to himself. When the conversation reaches the things he would never do today, he begins to answer, then catches himself. “There’s so many things I used to do back then, but I look at it today and just like, oh, I can’t. It’s not even me,” he says.

The full explanation, he warns, would require at least two hours. For now, he only hopes that when he tells it, we’ll be there to witness it.

Before we hang up, Joey offers us a review of our own. This is our first encounter, but he says we “seem very cool,” adding, helpfully, that he likes cool people. Then, after gospel, Highlife, streaming numbers, and failure have all had their turn, he leaves us with one more thing: “Culture will always win, in my opinion.”

Written by: HQ

Interview by: Cyril Senason

Photography: Emily Brownett

Creative Direction: Supreme Eleblu

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