Tems sat across from the singer who shaped her as a girl in Lagos and did not hold back. In a first meeting published by Dazed on 10 September 2026, the Nigerian star told Kate Nash that Auto-Tune ruins her voice and that artificial intelligence has no soul.
The meeting was a full circle moment. Growing up in Lagos, Tems struggled to fit in at school in Lekki. An uncle loaded about 2,000 tracks onto her first iPod when she was 12, and Nash’s songs became a friend. She learned the piano by playing records such as “Mouthwash” and “Mariella,” then began writing her own.
“You have no idea. This is my younger self’s dream come true. I always felt like you were singing my thoughts. I was growing up in Nigeria, but I felt like you were more my friend than so many people,” she told Nash.
She continued:
“You have gifted me. A lot of my sound – playing the piano, for instance – I learnt that through your songs.”
That hunger for something human now shapes how she treats her voice.
“I always felt like Auto-Tune sounded horrible on my voice. That used to be the first thing that lots of producers would do to my voice, but it sounds super robotic,” Tems said.
She added:
“My voice is just weird; it sounds better when it’s raw. When you can hear the cracks. AI is without a soul. I want to hear wrong notes and emotion.”
Tems said she likes looking at the view from her apartment in silence and will sit until she gets bored. Social media, she argued, is warping how people see the world.
“When you’re online so much, you don’t realise how much other people’s opinions are affecting how you see the world. It’s making people miserable, actually.”
She keeps two phones, one for social media and one with no apps, and locks them in a cabinet at home.
“I put them in the cabinet, and I exist in my house without a phone. Not to be dramatic, but I kind of realised it’s life or death.”
Nash, marking 20 years since Made of Bricks, said listeners will crave human flaws even more as AI spreads. Tems already lives that argument.