“Everybody is a star,” or so sang Sly and the Family Stone in 1969. But once an artist sees the truth in that, how to make it a reality? It’s a question that Memphis R&B singer-songwriter Syng Saikou has been grappling with since she was in ninth grade.
Even at that young age, she’d already been singing for years. “My kindergarten teacher actually made me sing a solo at my kindergarten graduation,” she says. “So ever since then, I just get on stage with the mic in my hand. And I definitely was singing in the church as well. I was forced to!”
Those experiences, and the positive feedback she garnered from them, in turn led her to start writing her own songs at a very young age. “I started writing in the seventh grade,” she says. “And I was just writing about stuff that I was hearing about and stuff that I was seeing my mom go through, and my aunties and uncles and people like that. So I was writing based off of their life experiences.”
Nowadays, in her late twenties, she writes more than ever, and from her own experience, but the process is not that different from when she started. “I have to be in a secluded, dark space — like the bathroom!” she laughs. Such methods matter little. When opportunity struck, she was ready to produce material on demand. And that opportunity arrived thanks to her alma mater, Sheffield High School.
“We had a talent show at school, let me just start there,” Saikou explains. “And this coach at the school, he already had a beat, and was like, ‘I’ve got this beat and you’re gonna write to it. Can you write to this?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And so I came back a couple days later [with a song], and he was like, ‘Yep, you’re gonna do that at the talent show.’ Like, that wasn’t my plan, but …” She shrugs, accepting her destiny.
The song she recorded, “I Told You,” struck a nerve with her fellow students after she performed it at the talent show and then posted it on SoundCloud. “Everybody in the school was just so attached to that song, I guess. Because I was in the ninth grade, I was really young, and they were like, ‘This girl got on stage singing about how she just went through a breakup!’”
Even after that, Saikou took her time pursuing music more seriously. “I didn’t really record anything else until after I graduated because that’s when I could do more. So I was holding on to that one song from ninth grade to 12th grade. And by then, you know, I could go to the studio when I wanted to. I just stepped into my artistry.”
Her first move in that direction was to create a stage name that expressed her aesthetic. “Every time I’d go perform somewhere, at karaoke or performing live with a band or something, somebody in the audience would be like, ‘Sing it, girl!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, so maybe that should be my name. But instead of the I, I’m gonna use a Y.’ Then I wanted a foreign last name that would match Syng, so I picked ‘Saikou,’ which means ‘the best’ or ‘supreme’ in Japanese.”
She began performing and soon was sharing the stage with some major artists. “I opened up for Keke Wyatt, R. Kelly’s group Public Announcement, Sir Charles Jones, Anthony Q. People like that.” But things really started to happen in 2019, with January of 2020 seeing the release of her first single, “Soul Tie,” a melodic meditation on a relationship over a beat, layered with synth-harp arpeggios, that sounds positively otherworldly. Over the coming years she would release seven more singles, including “Bipolar,” one of the loveliest, most lilting ways to confront mental health challenges one could imagine. She has clearly assembled a stable of different studio wizards who match her vibe perfectly, including one of her primary go-to producers, Michael Barringer.
Finally, this May saw the release of her first album, Saikou: Volume 1, which reveals a strikingly mature artist in her prime. And while she can still write from the point of view of others, like her uncles and aunties, there’s a deep autobiographical undercurrent to the album that gives it the ring of authenticity. As she proclaims in “Know Me,” the opening track, “Don’t let my intellect and pretty face deceive you.”
With that initial mystery, she begins to connect the dots of who she is, especially with the powerful “Existence”: “I’m from Memphis, it’s a liquor store and church on every corner/It’s a cold world but fasho my city colder.” Thus laying out the context, she then makes it an anthem of self-realization. “Can you understand me?/Patiently waiting for a Grammy/They say you gotta be persistent/I think it’s better if you speak it to existence/Speak it to existence/You gotta speak it to existence, yeah.”
That perfectly sums up her attitude and her determination to manifest her dream. Aiding and abetting her on her mission is rapper Big Boogie, whose cameo on “Existence” cheers her on: “Just push the button on your career, watch you speed up/Get in that bag and don’t look back, you gon’ be up! … You gotta speak it to existence (yeaaaaah)!”
Right on cue, Saikou is facing 2026 with a sense of possibilities and hope. “I’m actually in a new movie. It hasn’t released yet. It’s called Emily’s Hand, and we’re actually doing a theatrical version at the Crosstown Theater in March. After the stage play is done, the film will come out. And then I’ll be releasing Volume 2, a feature with Anthony Q., and several videos in early 2026 as well. The video for ‘Know Me’ is going to be first. That’s the one with the most traction on the radio, and it’s also been placed in the movie. So I’m really excited!”