Theo Adesina

Sleeve note.

Written for the inside fold.

I am Theo's older sister. I am, by trade, a music writer — five years at The Wire, two at NATIVE, currently freelance — which makes me, by the family's reasoning, the person responsible for organising the sleeve note. Fine. I will do the sleeve note.

Theo is eighteen on the 19th of September. He has been, since he was nine, the kind of listener who plays a record three times in a row before he speaks about it. The Sade Promise tape that lived in the front of our father's Honda from 2014 until the Honda was sold in 2019 — Theo played it on long drives, in the back seat, with the windows down on the third mainland bridge in the dry season, and he said, once, at twelve, "Funmi, this song is not, on any account, finished. The song is finished. The recording is not." He has, in the six years since, said versions of the same sentence about almost everything he loves.

In March of 2024 he made the entire family — our mother, our father, our aunt Bisi, the dog — sit in the sitting room and listen to A Seat at the Table from "Rise" through to "Closing: The Chosen Ones" without speaking, including the interludes. We were quiet for ninety-one minutes and seven seconds. At the end of it our mother, who had not, on any prior occasion, sat still for ninety-one minutes, said, "Theo. That was, I want to say properly, the most attentive I have been to anything since your father proposed." Theo nodded once. He did not say anything. He has not, since, asked us to do it again. He did not need to.

This is a record for him. The roster is eight people in the order they sit on the wall — sister, best friend, girlfriend, bandmate, mum, uncle, cousin, the friend who has known him longest. Side A is the people from now; Side B is the people from before. Read the titles. Listen for the runtimes. The total runtime is, by my calculation, almost exactly the length of side one of Promise. We did not, before you ask, plan that. — F.