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She Walked Away From Music. Then She Wrote Herself Back.
- BEATCAVE
- May 7
- 6 min read
Akilah the Creative's debut single "Born to Shine" isn't just a first release. It's a reckoning with the years she spent silencing her own gifts.
There's a version of Akilah Walcott that almost never existed. Not because the talent wasn't there, it clearly was, but because at nineteen she made the decision that a lot of young people with real gifts quietly make: she chose the path that made sense on paper and tucked everything else away for later.
Later almost never came.
Walcott, a Black Guyanese woman raised in Canada, had been steeped in music almost before she understood what that meant. At eight years old, she'd ask her dad to turn off the car radio so she could imagine she was the one performing. Piano lessons followed, formalized under The Royal Conservatory of Music, where she trained as a competitive pianist from ages twelve to sixteen. Her high school choir introduced her to classical voice, opera, and contemporary technique. She was forming singing groups, performing at coffee houses, building the kind of intuitive relationship with music that most people spend their whole twenties trying to find.
Then she went to McMaster University to study nursing, and something quietly closed.
"I was never taught as a child that my creative gifts were valuable enough to make room for me in this world. Nursing seemed like the most practical and fulfilling choice, and it was. But now I realize I didn’t have to give up my passions for practicality. I’m realizing that I am, we all are, multifaceted." she's said about that period. She lost the muscle memory for piano entirely. Her writing dried up. The connection she'd spent years building to her own creative instincts became harder and harder to access the further she moved from practicing them. By the time she graduated in 2021 with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing, she'd received a clinical education she'd use, and lost something she hadn't fully understood she needed.
What came after graduation was a process of excavation. She rejoined a church choir, began working as a background vocalist, and spent time rebuilding her technical musicianship from the inside out. In 2022, she rededicated her life to God, and something shifted in how she understood her creativity. It stopped feeling incidental. It started feeling like something she'd been given specifically, and therefore something she was responsible for.
"I rededicated my life to God, and my relationship with art shifted. My passion for creativity no longer felt random. It felt very intentional, like something I was meant to steward."
By 2023, she was performing music and poetry fusion sets at open mics and community events, weaving together two disciplines she'd always carried in parallel. Writers who can sing, or singers who can write, are not uncommon, but the combination tends to produce something specific: a heightened attention to what words actually do in a song, how they land, what they carry beyond their literal meaning. That sensibility shows up clearly in her art. She served as volume lead and editor of "The Door of Return Anthology," exploring African and Caribbean mythology. Her writing has appeared in Trad Magazine and Jayu Poetry Zine. She's performed at Black History Month celebrations at McMaster, where, returning as an alumna in 2025, she recited her poem "Dear Black Girl" to a room that hadn't known her when she was a student trying to be only one thing.
"I was never taught as a child that my creative gifts were valuable enough to make room for me in this world. Nursing seemed like the most practical and fulfilling choice, and it was. But now I realize I didn't have to give up my passions for practicality. I'm realizing that I am, we all are, multifaceted."
The debut single "Born to Shine" carries all of that in it.
The song began the way most honest things do: without a plan. A melody came to her and stayed there, unfinished, for almost a year. She was recording vocal layers in the free studio space of her local library, building something in open air without quite knowing what it was. Then a company called CAUFP reached out asking her to perform original music at their sunset summer social. She said yes, knowing she didn't have a finished song. She gave herself two weeks to write it.
"I had to jump before I felt ready and trust that I'd be able to finish it."
That particular pressure, the deadline, the commitment made before the art was ready, is what unlocked the song. The hook already existed: "you are bright, you are kind, you're a light, let it shine." What she needed was the story underneath it. She found it by asking herself who needed to hear those words the most. The answer was a younger version of herself who hadn't believed any of them yet. The verses came from there: a more grounded, present self speaking back across time to the girl who thought her gifts weren't worth taking seriously.
She debuted it live over an instrumental she'd found online. The crowd connected with it immediately.
The recorded version came together with London-based producer Rory Sturgeon, who Walcott found through his work with strings and orchestral elements. They never occupied the same room. The entire collaboration was built through emailed files, sending versions back and forth across the Atlantic, revising, listening, sending again. Walcott recorded the main vocals at Precision Studios in her hometown, returned to a friend's space for harmonies and layering, and shipped everything to Sturgeon to mix and build around. He incorporated live instrumentation throughout: piano tracked with multiple microphones to preserve both clarity and room warmth, guitar, bass, and strings either played live or carefully blended with high-quality sampled sounds. Percussion was treated the same way, brushes and sticks alongside programmed elements, softening the rhythmic texture. Shared reverb spaces across the track create the sense that every instrument exists in the same world.
Her vocal approach was equally deliberate. No autotune. Minimal processing. She wanted the emotion to come through as it is, not as it might be smoothed into being. For a debut record, that's a confident choice. It means the performance has to carry its own weight.
"I believe there's beauty in hearing the human voice as it is."
The sound she and Sturgeon arrived at sits in a genuinely specific place: neo-soul and soulful R&B elevated by classical orchestral texture, intimate in one moment and expansive in the next. The comparison points she references are telling. Cleo Sol's vulnerability and genre fluidity, the way that artist builds sonic worlds without boxing herself in. Lianne La Havas and the ease with which she carries live instrumentation alongside her voice. Sondae's unconventional approach to expressing faith. All three are artists who create from a place of intentional wholeness, and Walcott clearly understands what that costs and what it produces.
The music video extends the song's central dialogue into something visual. Walcott plays both versions of herself: a younger iteration surrounded by journals, childhood objects, and references to her early relationship with creativity, intercut with the present-day version inhabiting a more elevated space. Light is used deliberately throughout as a symbol of growth, visibility, and the process of being recognized, first by others, then by yourself. The final image, the younger version of herself watching who she's become and beginning to believe what she's seeing, closes the loop the song opened.
She chose April for the release intentionally. It marks the month she was baptized, two years earlier. The alignment between the personal and the artistic is not coincidental. It's the whole point.
"The song really became a self-affirmation, something I was writing for my younger self about who she would become. I think that's why when people hear it they connect to it, because it's coming from a very real place."
There's a real tradition in R&B and neo-soul of artists who treat their music as testimony, who are transparent about the gap between who they were and who they're working to become. What distinguishes the best of them is that the music never collapses into pure inspiration narrative. It stays honest about the difficulty, the time it took, the version of yourself you had to leave behind. "Born to Shine" does that. It's not a success story dressed up as a song. It's a conversation, ongoing, unresolved in the most human sense, between doubt and something quieter that keeps insisting on being heard.
Walcott has a follow-up single already in production. She's talked about expanding into film, into writing, into other creative forms that sit alongside music rather than beneath it. The shape of what she's building is still becoming clear. But the foundation that "Born to Shine" establishes is real: a sound rooted in discipline and feeling, a perspective grounded in lived experience, and an understanding of her own creative life that took years to earn.
The gifts were always there. She just had to find her way back to them.
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