TMJ’s “Storyteller” Questions Dreaming and Doing

By Tomide Marv

This song, “Storyteller”, opens with a brassy fanfare that cues in the singer, Tomide Joseph, popularly known as TMJ. The jazzy drums inspire movement, the trumpets blow mellow. The tambourine squeaks and makes the feet bounce. The atmosphere is busted and blue. The instrumentation is busy and groovy as it’s immersive.

They keep to time and hit with intention. It’s clear that they are loaded with a conversation that predates the song itself.

An undeniable thing about great storytelling music is the artist’s fluency in its language. It is being engaged with memory, and TMJ, a UK-based Nigerian singer, sounds like someone in conversation with memory, whether he’s inspired by personal stories or life drama.

In this track, that instinct comes alive into a gentle but gripping exchange between a father and a son. The kind that happens in a living where they sit across from each other, and the father tries with everything he has to shake his son awake. There’s a tenderness to the way TMJ builds this story. The young dreamer at the center of the song is someone most of us have been at some point: full of visions, dazzled by the wonder of the world, intoxicated by the idea of greatness, yet frozen at the edge of action. He can see the horizon. He just won’t walk toward it. But his mouth works just fine, full of excuses, explanations, reasons and plenty of stories that touch.

And his father sees right through all of them.

The interplay between the father and son is where “Storyteller” finds its center. When the father asks, “What about your dreams?”, and the son responds, “Baba mi, you wouldn’t understand.” It’s the son’s quiet resignation to defeat and the father meeting him exactly where he is to give him the truth that only lands when it comes wrapped in love: “If you must to chop, you must to work.”

This is a Yoruba sensibility distilled into admonition. It’s that figurative slap you give a kid with left hand to caution and hug with right hand to show affection. It’s that mix of bluntness and affection, the refusal to let someone you love get comfortable in their own excuses.

The production value stays all-time high. In the second verse, gangan has been introduced into the music. Sonically, TMJ proves himself a rare musician. He delivers a familiar sound but in an unorthodox approach. It’s lush without being cluttered. The trumpets keep rising and falling like sighs. The tambourine continues to add urgency, perhaps a gentle insistence that mirrors the father’s message to his boy to move. They all captivatingly come together to anchor the song in something older and deeper than any single life.

TMJ vocals float across these layers with ease. You can hear the jazz training in his phrasing, the soul in the breath control, the juju in his rhythms. He embodies these influences so well, as though they were never separate to begin with. TMJ speaks in the voice of the father and son. His voice hoovers between them as if he understands the frustration of each side. You hear the resignation, but also the embarrassment and caution. You hear hope and also fear of being exposed as unserious.

“Storyteller” isn’t mocking dreams. It’s suspicious of dreams that never risk failure. By the time the song ends, it’s clear that beneath the father-son exchange is a one-on-one between intention and inertia, dream and the refusal to chase them. The song doesn’t resolve this exchange. It doesn’t bring us a triumphant breakthrough or moral now. The song just lingers in between, in the space where many actually live. The dreams are still there. The excuses are still there. The father’s voice is still there — and you’re left to decide which one you’re going to listen to. Left with the uncomfortable truth that imagination alone isn’t the drive to success.

This fusion song is a great story of what we see daily. TMJ isn’t just a storyteller, he’s calling the storytellers out.