Since Erin Skipper launched her podcast Tune Into You Media in 2022, it has been steadily gaining traction. Focused on the healing power of consciousness, music, and dance, the podcast features emerging and underrepresented artists, both local and international, with an emphasis on Nigerian artists, who span musical genres from Afrobeats to hip-hop, R&B, Afropop, and Afrosoul.
Skipper says the idea grew out of a project she’s been working on since 2015 while living in Los Angeles. “I’ve always had a strong obsession with music,” she says. “I used to have a radio show on the Fairfield radio station KRUU called Eden’s Hour.” She also maintained a music blog while doing social media for the David Lynch Foundation: “I had a lot of access to artists and musicians around the world through that channel,” she says.
Skipper, who graduated from MIU in 2004, returned to Fairfield from Los Angeles in 2018 after experiencing a lot of trauma and grief. She says she has always used music and dance as tools to channel and process grief, and she “fell in love with Afrobeats because of the amazingly diverse international community here.”
A unique West African style of music that emerged in Nigeria and Ghana in the early 2000s, Afrobeats fuses African and Caribbean musical influences to create upbeat, danceable music with syncopated rhythms. Skipper says listening to Afrobeats “became a tool to finally experience some joy after a lot of pain and loss.”
Because of her positive experience with Afrobeats, she started reaching out to various musicians via Instagram, and connected with a young Nigerian musician and artist named Valdozzy, who blew her away with the high-quality work he was creating. Equally impressed by all the collaborations that he had done with his friends—who were videographers, photographers, and producers—Skipper was inspired to relaunch her music show as an interview platform called Tune Into You Media. She calls it “a way to put a spotlight on underground artists and musicians,” she says, “mostly from Nigeria, but including wherever I happen to be or whomever I happen to be inspired by.”
It was her original conversation with Valdozzy that allowed her to build connections and start conversations with phenomenal but unknown artists. “That’s really who I’ve wanted to focus on—talented up-and-coming artists. Not just because of the music itself, but also because of the depth of conversations and spiritual connections that have organically grown through this process.”
The podcast led to surprising connections. “I even landed an interview with Dayo ‘D1’ Adeneye, a significant media personality in Nigeria and one of the founding pioneers of modern-day Afro-beats. He was featured in the Netflix documentary Afrobeats: The Backstory.”
Skipper has also interviewed guitarist and producer CJ Obassey, who performs with some of Nigeria’s top artists, as well as producer and songwriter Kemena, whose freshman album Bond reached number 24 on the Apple Music Top 100 World Albums.
On the home front, Skipper has also featured Fairfield artists on her podcast. Chronic illness prevents her from sitting at the computer all day, so when a 2024 Cultural Alliance Grant gave her the budget to hire video editors, she was able to post content more frequently.
Skipper is excited to have a media channel she can use to spotlight local artists. She is particularly excited about a video she made of a collaboration involving a poem, “Lebanon Meet Israel,” written and performed by Katherine Eid Wild about meeting artist Ananda Kesler. “It’s so touching to me,” Skipper says, “because it shows the possibility of connecting and how close we are as humans even though we might come from hugely different backgrounds. Katherine’s [father is] from Lebanon and Ananda is from Israel, yet they come together and have this depth of connecting and realizing that at the core, we’re all one.”
Skipper says our innate interconnection is a theme that often comes up in her interviews with artists. She feels this recognition of our interconnectedness is sorely lacking in the world right now. “We need some hope and inspiration for unity. We need to be able to see beyond our borders and boundaries and differences, and recognize our similarities.”
Skipper decided to use her remaining grant funds to focus on artists featured in Stacey Kitakis’s International Small Works Show, filming and interviewing them in their studios. “That’s also really inspiring,” Skipper says. “This particular show has a hugely diverse body of work that showcases so many incredibly talented Fairfield artists.”
Some of the artists she’s covered so far are members of the Stimson family, Paul Morehead Jr., Chris Cambridge, and Jenny Sammons.
“This whole project has really been a passion project,” Skipper says. “It’s been going slowly because of my own physical limitations . . . but I also feel like the slowness of it has been a beautiful way to be very intentional about which artists I connect with.”
She adds, “I hope some day it builds into something bigger. But even if it doesn’t, I just love the process of doing it.”
Find Tune Into You Media on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. Links to all artist interviews and their playlists are found at ErinSkipper.com/people.