LYNN — Ahanna Williams Ugorji is an electrical engineer in his professional career, but his ability to musically engineer songs has led him to explore a passion for songwriting, and publish rap music in his free time.
Moving to Lynn from Nigeria in middle school, he said he always knew he wanted to make music. He remembers in a computer skills class at Breed Middle School, students had free time to play games, but he would spend the class trying to make beats on the garage band application.
He said he never really had the access to the tools to make music until college, at which point he met some friends who taught him about musical engineering.
Ugorji said putting out his first song his senior year of college, in 2019, was anticlimactic because although he’d always been musical, he never practiced any instruments and did not feel confident in his writing.
“I wasn’t very good at guitar, and so I was trying to combine different techniques. So I was sampling myself, playing and chopping up the samples to make sure it sounded right,” he said.
But the COVID-19 isolation was a “gamechanger,” as it provided him with time to sit with his musical skill set and harvest his talents.
Describing his old work as “muffled emotion,” the creation of his recent songs have been a journey of trying to tap into a mindset that energizes people.
That’s how Ugorji came to his newest work, “Here I Am.”
The album is work of Ugorji showing vulnerability, which he admits he struggles with. He said a lot of people throughout his life have told him he needs to try.
“I don’t want people to know what’s going on in my life,” he said, adding he’s been trying to be more open with his emotions in his music and in his own life. “Like Taylor Swift, she does well because everybody knows what she’s going through.”
He said his first long-term relationship pushed him out of his comfort zone too.
“She kind of opened my eyes up to a lot of things, and helped me grow as a person,” he said.
At the start of his relationship, Urgorji said he was writing love songs for his “amazing girlfriend,” but then they began not seeing eye to eye.
Ultimately, each song reflects a different emotion he was feeling during his relationship, he said. His favorite song being one titled “For You,” which he wrote on a bass his ex-girlfriend bought him for his birthday.
He said he improvised the beats and lyrics on the bass the day he received it, and that is what ended up becoming the song.
“When I freestyle, I feel like that’s my subconscious speaking. So I record my freestyles, and then I go back listening through and try to refine what my subconscious was trying to say,” he said.
On the album, Ugorji also worked closely with another artist who goes by the name Preacher.
He said throughout the project, Preacher, who is a friend that he met at Classical High School, was someone with whom he often shared his emotions throughout his relationship. The two would then find ways to transform these emotions into beats and lyrics.
“So I reach out to Preacher, because he’s very good with words,” Ugorji said.
Ugorji is also an visual artist and created the album cover art himself, which he said is inspired by Alexandre Cabanel’s “The Fallen Angel,” which depicts an angel who is upset to have been cast out of Heaven.
“I hope people take away from this album that we shouldn’t be afraid to try new things or put themselves out there. I hope people see that it’s okay to be vulnerable. Nothing bad is going to happen,” he said.
Outside of music, Ugorji said he has goals of going to graduate school to research the enhancement of prosthetic technology. He currently works as an engineer at Piaggio, which is an Italian motor vehicle manufacturer.
Ugorji’s degree is in electrical engineering and he has experience in radio frequency engineering and robotics.
He said he wants to investigate methods of achieving human-to-computer interfacing without tapping into the brain.
Wherever his career takes him, he wants his passions for both music and engineering to be included.
“I don’t want to sacrifice music or engineering,’ he said.
