“I just guess knowing that life is meant to be experienced, and then you just create your own happiness sometimes,” he tells tmrw. “Even if you're going through something today, it will only last for a bit. Joy comes in the morning.”

That philosophy sits at the center of Fuji, his latest album and an expansive reflection on the sounds, people, places, and experiences that have made him who he is. The record is celebratory, but it is not untouched by grief. It is deeply rooted in Nigerian musical history while reaching toward a contemporary audience. It contains songs for lovers, children, family, confidence, money, and mourning. More than anything, Gold hopes it allows listeners to understand him a little better.

“I hope you know more about me,” he says. “Because I shared my grief, spoken about my family. Talk about where I'm from. You know, talk about love. And everything good.”

For Gold, those things are not separate. “The joy, the pain, the sadness. All of these emotions that need to be felt,” he says. “I think they are all connected somehow.”

Gold's relationship with Fuji begins long before the album. Growing up in Lagos, the genre was impossible to escape. It was not simply something he listened to; it was part of the environment that formed him.

“Fuji is like the soundtrack of Lagos,” he says.

He describes the genre as highly percussive, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but always deeply connected to Nigerian life.

“When I was growing up, it was played, so I couldn't escape it,” Gold says. “So I just wanted the world, you know, that might never get to hear the sound that raised me to hear it.”

For Gold, making Fuji became an act of preservation as much as creation.

“So I made it,” he says. “I preserved it for the future, basically. Afrobeats, as we know it today, started from somewhere,” he explains. “It came from our grandparents, and one of them is Fuji. Fuji is one of the oldest sounds from Nigeria, just like every other sound. Other sounds like Akpala, Highlife and all of that.”

Some of the album's most personal material came from an experience Gold could not have planned for.

“Simile” was originally written with another artist in mind, after Gold was approached to write for The Lion King album. But then his father died.

“I didn't even know what I was going to write about,” he recalls. “But then my dad died.”

The loss changed the song completely.

“First of all, I wasn't even enthusiastic about writing the song for the album anymore,” he says. “Because I wasn't in the frame of mind anymore.”

Eventually, he went into the studio and stopped trying to write someone else's story.

“I just started to write my own experience,” he says.

The song could have remained part of that larger project. Instead, Gold realized that its subject matter belonged to him.

“It just felt like that's my story to share,” he says. “I don't think anybody—yes, Beyoncé would have done justice to it—but I would have because it's my story.”

Years later, that grief has become something unexpectedly intergenerational.

Gold recently shared a video of himself singing “Simile” with his daughter, turning a song born from losing his own father into a moment shared with his child.

“It's beautiful, even more beautiful,” he says.

His daughter loves Fuji, and “Simile” is one of the songs she returns to most. But she is not the only child who has found a place inside his music. Gold wrote “My Love Is the Same” for his daughter, and now his son has developed his own relationship with it.

“Anytime my son, you know, cries, once I play ‘My Love Is the Same,’ the song I wrote for his sister, it calms him down,” Gold says. “He stops crying the moment he hears the song.”

“I don't think there's any getting used to such a feeling of sharing,” he says. “You know, that moment with my children. They'll forever be in all of it.”

His daughter has already begun stepping into that musical world herself. At Gold's Royal Festival Hall performance, she opened the recording with a special introduction. Backstage, he remembers her excitement more than his own nerves.

“She was eager to go on stage,” he says. “I'm like, ‘Chill, it's not your—’ She was like, ‘It's my show.’ She did amazing.”

Watching the footage afterward has become its own source of joy.

“Every time I watch clips from the show and see how confident she was on our stage, it makes me feel very good,” he says. “Makes me feel good that, okay, we have another star, you know, in the making.”

She is entering a story that began long before him and, if he has anything to say about it, will continue long after him.

“It feels good to know that a journey already started,” he says.

Gold has spoken publicly about living with sickle cell disease and the physical realities of growing up with it. For him, the experience has become inseparable from the resilience he brings to his career.

“Honestly, the way living with sickle cell [has been], because I've had to fight all my life, you know, through the pain and everything,” he says. “It's taught me to be very resilient.”

“But I never let sickle cell define me,” he says.

That mentality followed him into adulthood.

“I think I carried on that mentality to everything with me,” Gold says. “Even with the music. I don't take no for an answer. If I feel like a song is not where it's supposed to be yet, I just keep going.”

That same philosophy is behind the Adekunle Gold Foundation, through which Gold has created a space for people living with sickle cell disease.

He wants young people living with sickle cell to understand that a diagnosis does not have to mean abandoning their ambitions.

“I wanted kids, people living with sickle cell, to know that it's not a death sentence,” he says. “It's something that you can live through, you know, and still live your dreams.”

For Gold, advocacy is therefore another extension of his art.

“It might be a form of storytelling,” he says. “Because, like I said, I shared my story.”

He is careful to make the distinction that he is still living with sickle cell. There is no neat before-and-after narrative.

“I haven't gotten a bone marrow transplant, for example. I'm still living with sickle cell, and I'm still getting to do everything I want to do,” he says. “I'm still dreaming. I'm still ambitious. If that's what I have to keep doing to give more people hope,” he says, “for people to stand up, to not give up on themselves because of this disease that I didn't choose, yeah, I think it's a form of storytelling that is always engaging.”

If Fuji is an album about Gold's life, it is also an album about where he comes from.

Gold has previously spoken about the tension between writing in English for an international audience and choosing Yoruba when English simply cannot hold what he wants to say. For him, Yoruba is not a stylistic flourish. It changes the emotional weight of the music.

“The most perfect emotion,” he says when asked what Yoruba allows him to communicate. “Especially when I'm writing love songs. There's things you say in Yoruba that English can't.”

In English, he explains, love can become simple and familiar: “I love you. I love you.”

“But sometimes when you say it in Yoruba, it carries much more weight,” he says. “I just feel like English just masks it sometimes. But Yoruba says the real thing, the way it's supposed to sound.”

Still, Gold does not believe understanding every word is necessary for music to connect. He thinks back to growing up in Nigeria and listening to Congolese music.

“We listened to music from that side and from other parts of the world where we don't even understand their language, but we danced,” he says.

That, to Gold, is one of music's most powerful qualities.

“Music really cuts across all ages by languages,” he says. “Music is such a blessing, regardless of language.”

Perhaps that is why joy feels like such an appropriate word for Fuji and Fuji Orchestra. Not because the album ignores grief, but because it refuses to treat grief as the end of the story.

There is a father he lost and a daughter who now sings the song that emerged from that loss. There is a diagnosis he has lived with and a foundation built from his experience. There is a musical tradition he inherited and an album through which he hopes to preserve it.

And there is the younger Adekunle Gold, the child who grew up singing in church and could not yet know what his voice might become.

If he could speak to that version of himself now, Gold would have one message.

“Worry less about what you're going to become, how big you're going to be, where you're going to become, what's your life going to be,” he says. “Worry less, because you'll be great. And you are great.”

By the end of Fuji, Gold hopes listeners leave with more than a collection of songs. He hopes they leave with a fuller understanding of the person behind them.

“I hope you feel like you understand me more,” he says. “And I hope you hear your own message there. There's a song that you can sing to your children,” he says. “There's one for your significant others. There's a song that makes you feel confident.”

Then he arrives at perhaps the simplest description of what he has made:

“Fuji is really like a soundtrack for your life.”