Well 2 years later, I’m back with a little more information, courtesy of an NBC News feature on him. Nana Kwabena is Grammy-nominated songwriter and music producer who has helped create hits for the likes of John Legend, Rick Ross, as well as fellow Wondaland label mates, Janelle Monae and Jidenna.
But did you know his musical genius and path to the entertainment industry began in a hospital? The 31-year-old was diagnosed with sickle cell disease at a young age and says that he spent so much of his childhood in and out of medical facilities; it often felt like he was raised in the hospital.
Kwabena describes his ins and outs of the hospital, and the beeps of the machines in his room as ‘a soundtrack of death’, that he had to do something to change. He taught himself how to use Fruity Loops, and started to create his own songs to drown out the noise of those beeps and blips.
Kwabena soon found his purpose in life, and according to him, he knew he wanted to pursue music and at the same time shed light on sickle cell disease. In 2012, Kwabena founded the nonprofit advocacy organization AllOneBlood to help increase public awareness as well as funds for the millions of people living with sickle cell disease.
The organization has partnered with celebrities, hospitals and other organizations in order to bring this “forgotten disease” to the forefront.
Here are some highlights from his interview with NBCBLK:
I don’t come from a musical family. I was actually raised to become a doctor and I was pre-med in college. That was the path that my parents wanted me to take. As much as my parents pushed me down this path, my mom knew that I was going to be a musician. They were all just in denial about it because being a musician was taboo as a first-gen Ghanaian-American.
I went through school with two different lives. On one hand I’m studying to become a doctor with the idea of using that expertise to treat sickle cell disease by day, but then by night I was living a whole different life. I would be in Philly and have about 30 different Philly rappers in the room, their own Wu-Tang if you will, and I’m producing beats and then I have to say alright guys it’s six in the morning and I’m going to get an hour of sleep and then go take organic chemistry.
I remember graduating from UPenn (University of Pennsylvania) and thinking that these two things are getting too big and something’s got to give. I never quite knew how to make them work in concert with each other, so what do you do? You buy time.
I deferred my acceptance to George Washington University, to the Milken School of Public Health with the hopes of making it in music. I moved to New York and gave myself a year with the idea that if that didn’t work out, I was going to go back and continue pursuing the medical field. In my first year in New York I wrote a song with John Legend and thought maybe I should continue.
Nana Kwabena is working on a couple of projects including a short film. Read full interview on NBCNews.com.
