Ugandan singer and songwriter Dokta Brain has revealed that he once seriously considered walking away from the music industry and continuing his career from behind the scenes.
The singer said the struggles he experienced in the industry had pushed him to the point where he wanted to quietly disappear from the mainstream scene, work as a ghostwriter and eventually return to music as an entrepreneur.
Dokta Brain explained that his plan was to write songs for other artists without receiving public recognition for his work. He wanted the artists to perform his songs without mentioning that he was behind the writing.
“Initially, I just wanted to disappear. I wanted it to be that when I enter the studio, the artist shouldn’t mention that I’m the one who wrote the song, apart from those who know me. I wanted to be a ghostwriter and see whether I would come back to music as just an entrepreneur because since music is a calling, it will still look.”
At the time, Dokta Brain was already preparing himself mentally to leave the spotlight. Then ‘Bikyaganye’ arrived and changed the direction of his plans.
The singer said the song achieved milestones he had never reached during his music career, including hitting number one on music countdowns and YouTube.
That success was particularly significant because he had released the song while already contemplating his exit from the mainstream scene.
Dokta Brain said he initially worried that people might interpret the release as an attempt to gain sympathy at a difficult point in his career.
“When I released that song, I thought people would take it that I was looking for sympathy, yet I wanted to just disappear. Surprisingly, it has hit milestones that I had never seen. I have never been at number one on YouTube ever since I started doing music. But it was because of this song.”
Instead of becoming the final project before his disappearance, ‘Bikyaganye’ became the release that renewed his belief in his music career.
The unexpected turnaround has also left Dokta Brain reflecting on how differently things could have looked had he followed through with his original plan to become a behind-the-scenes songwriter.
For an artist who was preparing to quietly step away, reaching a career-first number-one milestone with the very song he thought might attract sympathy has given the story a very different ending — at least for now.