Best of What's Next: Nneka

Hometown: Warri, Nigeria
Album: Concrete Jungle
For Fans Of: Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Santigold

In 2000, like so many other teenagers before her, 19-year-old Nneka Egbuna left the home she’d always known to find her place in the world. But she didn’t pack up Mom and Dad’s minivan with hopeful visions of roommates and frat parties. Instead, she left her father and mothers (polygamy is common in her home country of Nigeria) for Germany, where she attended college and got to know her biological mother. What followed was a string of learning experiences—practical, emotional and formal—and a growing need to articulate what they stirred within her.

“A year after I arrived in Germany, I wrote a lot in a kind of diary and eventually, I started singing my diary,” Egbuna says today. “I used to always sing when I was young, but I never realized I had so much passion for music until I knew I was by myself and I needed something to hold onto.”

Journal entries became songs and songs became her 2006 debut, Victim of Truth, which caught the ear of European critics and earned her fans like Lenny Kravitz and Lauryn Hill. Despite her burgeoning career, Egbuna refused to neglect her studies at Hamburg University, graduating in 2008 with an anthropology degree. The balancing act was stressful, she says, but provided even more songwriting fodder. After years spent with academics “searching for reasons and the reasons for reasons,” she’s concluded that books alone can’t provide all the answers: “At the end of the day,” she says, “the solution to every problem, every negativity, is love.”

On her U.S. debut, Concrete Jungle (out in February) this faith in love ties together R&B-infused tracks about prejudice and corruption, songs crafted with conviction, pride and an awareness of herself and the intricacies of the world. Egbuna is adamant that music is her passion, not her career, and her plan for the near future is both lofty and simple: “I’m looking forward to being healthy and inspiring the world,” she says, “and being inspired by the world.”