Davido’s collaborative instinct has often influenced his creative output. This much has been clear since 2012, when he released his debut album Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis. In that album he’d featured seven guest artists. That number grew to nine in A Good Time. In his third album A Better Time, he hit a personal record of fourteen guest artists.
The artist’s sense of the collective can also be glimpsed in his personal life. He’s given to acts of generosity, often awarding scholarships and donating to orphanages. Charity, it seems, is the artist’s guiding principle. One need only consider the title of his 2022 North American tour—’We Rise By Lifting Others’.
Davido’s fourth album Timeless, released today, comes after a trying period for the artist and his family. His three-year-old son had drowned to death last November. As like many in grief, Davido had withdrawn from public life, a broad shawl of silence overhanging his social media accounts which once had been lively to boot. But if grief nudges many towards friendless isolation, it doesn’t seem the case with Davido, at least as far as creative output goes. Timeless brims with guest artists, ten in all, many of them up-and-coming, such as Logos Olori and Morravey. The album also reserves a place for veteran acts like Angélique Kidjo.
Musa Keys
In the album’s fifth track Unavailable, Davido features the up-and-coming South African music producer and deejay Musa Keys. Keys made his name in the Amapiano genre. So it’s fitting Unavailable is an Amapiano jam. Also fitting is that the song is produced by Magicsticks, whose penchant for South African house music was evident in his making of Asake’s debut album last year.
Though Musa Keys has previously worked with Nigerian artists, it’s his first time making a record with Davido. With his short verse and a nigh-whispery voice, Keys sings in line with the song’s overarching theme of self-aggrandisement.
Skepta
Skepta has often successfully imbibed elements of Nigerian pop music that one might sometimes forget he is primarily a grime artist of British sensibilities. His single Energy (Stay Far Away) with Wizkid was one of the biggest hits in Nigeria in 2018.
And yet he has only just made a record with Davido. He raps a verse in U (Juju), the album’s twelfth track. The song speaks of a love affair so intoxicating that one suspects one or both of the lovers must be under a spell.
Asake
No Competition, track thirteen in the album, probably presents this project’s most anticipated collaboration. Here Davido enlists Asake, who arguably was the most acclaimed Nigerian artist last year. Asake’s debut album Mr. Money With The Vibe had set all kinds of streaming records upon its release in 2022.
Like U (Juju), No Competition is a love-themed song. And for most of the time, both Davido and Asake are extolling a female love interest.
Morravey
Morravey, who is 19 years old, is still a medical student at Rivers State University in Port Harcourt. Yet she is already signed to one of the country’s most prestigious record labels, Davido Music Worldwide, a privilege she was recently afforded. Last year she’d impressed Davido with her freestyle to the instrumental of Ayra Starr’s Rush, which she’d uploaded to her TikTok page.
By including Morravey in his album, Davido hopes to introduce the young songstress to a wide audience. She features in the album’s third track In the Garden, a song likewise invested in making a romantic plea.
The Cavemen. and Angélique Kidjo
In the album’s eleventh track Na Money, Davido collaborates with artists whose style of music markedly differ from his. For the first time in his career, Davido makes a record with the Nigerian highlife band The Cavemen. and the multiple Grammy-winning artist Angélique Kidjo. But it’s The Cavemen.’s character that dominates the song.
Pulsing with highlife instrumentation, the song highlights a kind of romantic arrangement that’s mostly underpinned by materialism. Davido has often explored this subject, as in songs like The Money and A Milli.
Dexta Daps
In his sophomore album A Good Time, Davido features the Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan in Risky. In Timeless he features yet another Jamaican dancehall artist: Dexta Daps. They collaborate on Bop, the album’s sixth track.
But this isn’t their first rodeo. Dexta and Davido have previously worked together, the former featuring the latter in the 2021 single Scripture. As in Scripture, the duo are in a libidinous mood in Bop, their lyrics charged with lines which are sometimes explicitly sexual. Even the song’s title may have been intended to have a sexual meaning: in certain places, bop is slang for sexual intercourse.
Fave
Fave has Olamide to thank for giving her her first major co-sign. The YBNL boss had featured her in his UY Scuti album in 2021, after she’d impressed him and many social media users with her freestyle videos, some of which had gone viral online. Already she’s released an EP—Riddim 5, which was released last year and among which is the hit Baby Riddim.
In what’s their first work together, Davido features Fave in Kante, Timeless‘s tenth track. This song is partly an introspection and partly a romantic plea, the former prominent in Fave’s verse which she delivers with her typical nasal fluency, the latter prominent in Davido’s verse, in which he recalls some lines from Risky: “Big waist/ fine face.”
Logos Olori
Like Morravey, Logos Olori has just been signed to Davido Worldwide Music. Though he is still searching for his first break into the mainstream as a solo artist, his music-making days go back to his time as a student at Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu. There he’d met the producer Magicsticks; the two have since stayed as closely in touch as two palms clasped in prayer. “They need to discover this guy,” Magicsticks had fondly said of Logos Olori in an interview with The Culture Custodian last September.
Magicsticks’ charge might just come to pass, as Davido shares the stage with Logos Olori in Picasso, Timeless‘s fourteenth track. The song’s title refers to the 20th-century Spanish Cubist painter Pablo Picasso. This much is clear when Logos Olori sings in the hook, “so baby draw me closer like Picasso,” an obvious play on the word ‘draw.’
Like many songs in the album, Picasso is flecked with romance of the carnal sort.
Focalistic
Davido and Focalistic are usual collaborators, both in the studio and on stage. The South African Amapiano and Hip-hop artist had featured Davido and Virgo Deep in the remix of his single Ke Star, which was released in February 2022. The single charted at number 16 on Billboard Top Triller Global chart in the United States. And in March 2022, the two artists had performed together at 02 Arena in London.
In Timeless, Davido features the South African in Champion Sound, the album’s seventeenth and last track. The song was released as a single in November 2021. Bristling with heavy Amapiano percussion, Champion Sound works especially as a self-hype, Davido asserting himself as the champion of Nigerian pop music. The artist may have been absent from the music scene for a while, but he doesn’t want us to forget his place in an industry that wastes no time moving on to the next sensation. No wonder he ends Timeless on a bold, braggadocious note.