Stuck on Earth: The Making of Dele Ayoola’s “Astronaut in a Garden”

An astronaut is supposed to be in space. Dele Ayoola, however, is stuck on Earth.

It is the contradiction at the heart of his music, and perhaps of the man himself. Dele is a physics graduate who once imagined life among the stars, now building psychedelic worlds out of soul, hip-hop, metal, R&B, and jazz. The title of his latest Extended Play (EP), Astronaut in a Garden, captures that tension, the feeling of being made for one place and finding yourself somewhere else.

Dele knows something about that feeling. 

Off stage, the Jos-bred musician is quiet and unhurried, more inclined to watch a room than command it. On stage, he becomes something else entirely. He is charismatic, theatrical, and magnetic. Somewhere between those two versions of himself lies the story of how a would-be astrophysicist became an artiste.

“I am a musician,” he says. “I’m an eclectic person who loves to build experiences, and I fuse hip-hop with soul, metal, R&B and jazz.” He pauses, then adds the line that seems to govern everything else he says for the next hour. “I think music is a force for beauty and good, and I try to express that in everything I do by being my most authentic self.”

That authenticity, which he describes as “messy and occasionally backwards”, is the driving force behind Astronaut in a Garden — a project about the strange, frustrating, and sometimes liberating experience of becoming someone you never planned to be.

The EP is not, it turns out, a metaphor about beauty in space. It is about the frustration of being made for one place and finding yourself somewhere else.

“Growing up, I always wanted to be an astrophysicist,” Dele says. “So I went to the University of Jos and studied physics, thinking I was going to be an astrophysicist at some point in my life.” 

Somewhere around his third year, the plan changed. “My taste and my love changed, and I was sort of stuck in between that confusion, because here I was, being pulled by something that was radically different from what I wanted to be.”

For someone who had imagined his future in space, music began to feel like an unexpected gravity. The title, he says, is that feeling made literal. “Here I am, an astronaut. An astronaut is supposed to be in space, but I’m stuck on earth. I just felt like that was the best way to capture that particular emotion,” Dele told JoeyOffAir. 

He didn’t set out to make a concept project. Instead, it found him mid-sentence, working with his producer, Kriscendo, and chasing a “psychedelic” sound without knowing its shape. 

“Kriscendo just whipped up something and sent it to me as an idea. I sat with it for a little bit, then I wrote something on it and sent it back,” Dele recalls. “I took a long walk after that, and I was just sort of thinking about what I had just written.”

That walk changed the scale of the whole record. “I now realised that the premise of what I had written there could actually be expanded into something that was larger. That was when I knew that every song that was going to come after that was going to be significantly larger than the next one.”

Not every track came easily. One refused to be written in order at all. The track, Sol, is a song addressed directly to God, and Dele says he simply could not begin it the normal way. “Everything that I wanted to say was so heavy. I could really not find the words to say it, but I knew how I wanted the conclusion to feel like,” he says. “So I wrote from there and then wrote backwards until I could find the words.” 

The process, he realised only afterward, was an excavation. “I had to actively walk through and unravel each and every one of the emotions I felt, just to give myself time to sit with it.”

Asked to name the emotion underneath it, he doesn’t hesitate. “Frustration was the primary one.” Why? “I mean, look at the world today. What’s there not to be frustrated about? Everything that happens in the world, you feel it personally too, on some level. Something happens two states away, whether you know about it or not, there’s just a certain kind of dark cloud it adds over your day,” he shares. 

Ironically, the song he trusted least survived best. TERRA, the EP’s opener, “was one we started out with as an idea, and I wasn’t too sure about it initially,” he says. “But then, it became one of the songs that people really love. I was confused about that.”

His stage name itself is a kind of a statement. Dropping his full name — Bamidele Olamilekan Ayoola — for something simpler, Dele, he says “represents the concentration of my most authentic self.” 

“That’s all. No pretention. It represents the core of me. This is who I am,” he added. 

Off stage, that core is almost unrecognisable to anyone who’s only met the performer. “He’s a very quiet, sneaky guy,” Dele says of himself, laughing at his own description. “He just wants to chill and read books, know things, listen to music, write music, and hang out with his friends when he can. The stage version is a different animal entirely, the one with the charisma, the Prince Charming vibe, the heavy metal artistic vibe, the one that likes to dress a certain kind of way.”

Dele is confident in his ability to work with the two personalities in him. “I don’t really struggle with it,” he says. “I just understand that I can separate the art and the artiste.  I give the artiste leverage to create. When it’s time for him to come out, he comes out, and he’s happy about it.” 

Sometimes, he admits, the performer wants more room than the private man is willing to give. “Sometimes the artiste would like to come out more. Well, sometimes the artiste just likes to chill when he’s done working, and he just wants to stay within the confines of his own space.”

Dele is open about the setback he has encountered. By his own count, he has built and abandoned five or six projects before releasing what became public. “I had to fail a lot of projects to understand how to properly work with some people, to understand how to view the system to help myself work, how to not write this song, and how to write this song,” he says. “It’s been a lot of years.”

The lesson repeated in Levitation, his own concert series born out of the University of Jos years, which he describes as “freedom of artistic expression. I just wanted people to come and be their best selves, their most expressive selves.” One early show nearly emptied the room. “A lot of people didn’t come this time,” he remembers of round one of an early rap-battle night. “We’re like, no problem.” Word spread anyway. “Round two, the venue was packed so full, people couldn’t stand. I was so happy.” The audience never knew how close it came to not happening. “They were saving our asses at that time,” he says. “It helped fund our eventual last concert.”

His real awakening came earlier still, at a 2017 show called Drum Feast, before Levitation existed and before he took music seriously. “There was something in my head and I just kept saying, ‘you’re holding yourself back, stop it, stop doing that.’ And I really did let myself go,” he says. “That was when I knew  I could do this for real.”

Off the record of press releases and Apple Music credits, Dele says the truest thing about him is the quietest. “I love nature. I don’t think I post about nature at all,” he says. “I love nature and I love animals. I love to sit in nature and just watch animals play around. That matters to me a lot, that peace of mind and solitude.”

It isn’t hard to hear the garden in that.

Jos, he says, is not incidental to any of it — it’s the source material. His band, his first producer, his choir years starting at age ten, his earliest mentors: all of it traces back to the city and to the University of Jos, where Levitation itself was born. “It has shaped my sound,” he says simply.

For Dele, what’s next is a double album called Selah, already decided before Astronaut in a Garden even released, which he describes only as “a myriad of sounds” built around vulnerability. He hasn’t decided on a release date yet, but one is coming. His definition of success has shifted from performing a role to something plainer: “a great show”, “a great song”, or simply “getting up and still choosing to do what I want to do.”

Asked how he wants to be remembered, he says just as “someone who always did his best, always tried to be excellent, and always tried to be human at the same time”.