Artist biography
TJ Owusu
TJ Owusu’s music began at home, but so did his curiosity about what music could do.
Born in Accra and raised in Teshie before moving to London at eight, TJ grew up around gospel and Ghanaian highlife. His mother and grandmother sang gospel, while his father listened to artists including Ebo Taylor and Daddy Lumba. Music was part of family life before it became something he thought of as a career.
TJ spent years as a church musician, playing guitar, singing, leading bands and choirs, and later teaching young musicians. Moving into open mic nights and local performances gave him the opportunity to explore his own voice and take the sense of connection he had experienced through church music into a wider space.
His musical curiosity has always extended beyond one tradition. Classical music opened another way of thinking about composition, while discovering the Weissenborn lap-slide guitar as a teenager introduced an instrument that would become an important part of his musical language. Warm and vocal in character, but equally capable of rhythm, percussion and force, the Weissenborn gave TJ another way to explore the relationship between voice, melody and groove.
That curiosity eventually led him to arrange the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata for solo Weissenborn. After six months developing the arrangement, he approached London’s historic Wilton’s Music Hall with the idea and performed it there.
Today, Ghanaian rhythm and highlife sit alongside gospel, blues and rock, Western harmony, classical composition and improvisation in TJ’s work. Rather than treating these influences as separate genres to combine, he sees them as parts of a musical language formed naturally through a lifetime of listening and playing.
That perspective now feeds into The Emissary, a trilogy inspired by a conversation with TJ’s mother about her former life as a diplomat. Her description of representing a home nation abroad sparked an analogy: the human being as an emissary, carrying something from a deeper source into the world.
Following releases including “Us,” “Identity” and “This Hurricane,” TJ’s new single “Relevance” continues that exploration through a dialogue between the questioning conscious mind and a deeper inner voice.
For TJ, this chapter is less about inventing a musical identity than recognising one that has been forming throughout his life.
The influences are already there. The work is to make them sound unmistakably like TJ Owusu.
