They say that from great pain comes great art and for Grace Mwai of the ‘Kirathimo’ hit song, this statement rings 100% true.
This is because before the release of the song which made her a household name, Miss Mwai had contemplated suicide and had plans to go through with it.
She revealed that she was driven by the need to succeed and since things were not working out as planned, she decided to end it all. She drove to Nanyuki where she had plans to purchase drugs to end her misery, but God had other plans. On that fateful day, it rained cats and dogs in Nanyuki and it was flooded forcing all chemists to close.
“Before I completed Kirathimo, I felt that my heart was discontented due to the struggles I was going through at that time. I withdrew from people and one day, I drove to Nanyuki and thought of killing myself to end it all. I didn’t know that I was very depressed. In my suicidal thoughts and withdrawing I didn’t know what I was going through,” she disclosed during an episode of the Reke Ciume Na Ene show.
Looking back, she reveals that the pharmacies were closed for a reason.
Dejected that she couldn’t kill herself, Grace called up their former worship leader who had relocated from Nyeri to Nanyuki and through her counsel she was able to have a change of mind and even finished composing the lyrics to Kirathimo, a song many thought was written at a victorious time.
However, a closer listen to the song betrays a soul in angst where she begs God to turn her life around that she may now be called blessed.“Kigarure maundu ukindue murathime (Turn things around so that I become blessed),” reads some lyrics from the song.
“There is this friend of mine who used to be our worship leader in Nyeri so I called her up and we met up and I opened up to her. She got the first-hand information as I hadn’t opened up to anyone before then. She concluded that I was very stressed and started counselling me telling me that God had great plans for me. She told me that the world needs to hear my music so how about I give it another shot. She understood my frustration as a young person and she told me that my story is not over yet,” she disclosed.
The singer revealed that the reason why she wanted to end things is because she was so frustrated as things were not going as planned.
“I was just frustrated because things did not happen as I wanted. I was too ambitious and I didn’t know how to handle disappointment,” she confessed.
She managed to finish the song through her pain but by the time she was done with it she was so over it that she did not bother to take it to radio stations.
As fate would have it a producer at Coro FM stumbled upon her music and as soon as he played it, other Kikuyu radio stations clamoured for it. Weeks later her music was on heavy rotation all across Kenya and that is how the hit ‘Kirathimo’ was born.