Eric Wainaina and Sheba Hirst launch music label
After a long hiatus, legendary songwriter and performer Eric Wainaina is making a comeback in music with the launch of his record label Rain Records, together with his spouse, Sheba Hirst.
The Daima Mkenya hitmaker says he was forced to re-strategise following the Covid-19 pandemic that shut everything down in 2020.
So it’s been a quiet couple of years for me. I guess 2020 came and did what it did and we had to shut down the live parts of our lives. The gigs, like a lot of things, went out the window.
Wainaina says he is now back in the scene and even bigger this time.
“We’ve started a record label. The label is named after the company Sheba (his wife) and I run called Rainmaker. So far we’ve got a new group on it called Television,” says Wainaina.
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The duo of Tim and Vini (T and V) have since released their first song under the label called Tell Your Mother, featuring Wainaina and TV.
“Tim and Vini write really good songs. I got to know them in their individual capacities. Tim was working on a musical with the excellent Elsaphan Njora. When I met Vini he was a law student. They both joined us at the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative and worked so well together that we thought we’d try them out as staff writers and that developed into them becoming recording artists,” adds Wainaina.
Wainaina, a former Tusker Project Fame judge, has been making music for over 22 years.
His first foray into music was with Five Alive, a gospel a cappella group comprising Victor Seli, Bob Kioko, Chris Kamau and David Mageria.
The group released their debut album, Five Alive, in 1996 and even went on a European tour that same year.
It was his experience with the group that convinced Wainaina to pursue music as a professional career.
When the group disbanded in 1997, Wainaina enrolled at Berklee College of Music in the US, where he graduated with a degree in music, specialising in songwriting and recording.
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