You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Just ahead's up that this episode contains explicit language, including discussion of a lyric that contains the N word.

O'Malley is a Nigerian singer, songwriter and producer. He's one of the young stars of Afrobeats, the West African genre that's become a global phenomenon.

His new album, Boy Alone, has had multiple hits, including a collaboration with Justin Bieber.

For this episode, O'Malley talked to me about the song Never Forget. Boy Alone was his late father's nickname, and the song Never Forget was inspired by him.

My name is Stanley O'Malley and I'm also known as O'Malley.

My father's name was Boy Alone. My father's that guy who came out from a very, very poor family and left the village and left his friends and went to the city all by himself and found his way, found my mom and settled down.

He was one of the first persons that ever I did that in his circle, so people started calling him Boy Alone.

He did everything by himself. No matter what anybody says, he would do it alone.

So much of the reasons why people called him Boy Alone, I had so much of that in me. I came from a very, very, very poor family and all by myself, I got to where I am today.

It's been like 13 years now since my father passed, but I've always known that I wanted to make a song for my late father.

I don't know if it was the right time, but yeah, I miss my dad.

Shemzi is the producer behind Never Forget. He made the beat.

My name is Shemzi and I'm a music producer from Nigeria.

He's one of the best music producers that I've ever worked with. So I was working. I was in a studio that night and he played the beat for me.

I made that beat sometime in 2019. I started with the drums. Then the parts.

So from there, I went to my bass line because I'm really particular about my bass.

Yeah, I wanted this art through groovy bass. Like Sunson is coming and be scared.

You don't have an idea of what's coming next.

I sent this beat to a couple of people and it didn't send me songs back.

Like nobody was feeling the beat like that, but I was here as something different. He just played and he wanted to move to the next beat.

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