Kevin Olusola, one-fifth of the Grammy-winning a capella group Pentatonix, says he’s felt “misunderstood” his whole life.
“My dad’s from Nigeria and my mom’s from Grenada,” the Adult Cross-Cultural Kid says in a recent Instagram post, adding that he was raised in suburban Kentucky.
“They kept telling me I was too black for the white kids,” he says. “I was too white for the black kids. I’m not African enough. I’m not African-American enough. I’m not Caribbean enough. I’m not hiphop enough. I’m not classical enough.
“When am I just going to be enough?” he continues. “When am I just going to finally fit in? And then I think to myself, well, maybe I’m not supposed to fit in, but then that feels isolating as well. And I just don’t want people feeling the same way I have always felt: crazy.”
To that end, Olusola has a new solo album, “Dawn of a Misfit,” coming out on May 9th.
OLUSOLA THE FLUENT CHINESE SPEAKER
Olusola, who mainly beatboxes for Pentatonix, is also a classically trained cellist who in addition happens to be fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
Learning Chinese and living in China for 18 months was one of the greatest experiences he’s ever had, according to Olusola.
“It was one of the most exciting times of my entire life,” he says in a video on his YouTube channel, adding that while he’d always loved studying abroad and traveling, “China happened very unexpectedly for me.”
Olusola entered Yale University as a pre-med student and also majoring in music.
“Those were the two things that I really loved and China kind of hit me like a train,” he says.
In 2006, then-Chinese President Hu Jintao invited 100 Yale students to go to China and meet him personally, and Olusola was one of 12 freshmen that got selected for that trip.
“It was the summer that happened after my freshman year of college and it completely changed my life,” he says.
Olusola went to China for 10 days and saw and experienced things that he had never experienced before, “and I knew from that experience that I had to continuously study it, I had to continuously explore it,” he adds.
Consequently, during his sophomore year, he began studying Chinese and the following spring and summer wound up living in China for six consecutive months at Peking University.
Those six months just happened to be when the Beijing Olympics were taking place during the summer, and Olusola remembers seeing outside his dorm window the opening ceremony as well as the fireworks lighting up the sky from the Bird’s Nest stadium.
“It’s just one of those experiences that you’ll never forget,” he says.
SETTING THE RIGHT TONE
Studying Mandarin Chinese can be very difficult because of the four distinct tones that are used in the language.
Early on, Olusola says he “would really mess those up.”
One day, Olusola was sitting on a bus next to a young woman, and began a conversation with her. During the chat, he thought he said, “If you have a question you can ask me,” but used the wrong tone for the word “ask.”
What he wound up saying was, “If you have a question you can kiss me,” upon which the young woman stared at him for a second and then slapped him in front of everybody on that bus.
“My Chinese friends were all laughing at me and I realized that I made a mistake and they taught me that mistake, and from there on out, I really paid attention to my tones because I didn’t want to get slapped ever again,” he says.
FULL TIME IN CHINA
At the end of those six months upon returning to Yale, Olusola decided during his junior year that he would switch his major to East Asian studies and deepen his Chinese language studies. That resulted in him taking the year off after his junior year and living in China “to just explore China, explore Chinese more in depth,” he says.
It’s just one of those experiences that you’ll never forget.
During that year in China, in addition to studying the language Olusola did a lot of music performances. He was featured on Chinese television and worked with the U.S. State Department “and I think it just set up the stage for me to do a lot of the stuff that I’m doing now with music.”
STICKING TO THE FUNDAMENTALS IN LANGUAGE AND MUSIC
When studying Chinese, one has to really understand the fundamentals before you’re able to go out into the street and really start talking to people and have real conversations, according to Olusola.
“You need to kind of build syntax — the same thing with language, same thing with music,” he says. “If you want to be a great jazz player, you have to understand jazz chords before you can go off and start improvising and start understanding what people are truly trying to say and understand the language. That was really important to me because I think with what I’m doing with beatboxing and cello playing and the skills that I’ve gained, I’m trying to use this musical knowledge to speak a language.”
Once you start mastering the language and you start to talk to people, at the end of the day you realize that everybody is human and everybody worries about the same things, according to Olusola.
“Parents still wonder in Italy and in China and in America whether their child is going to go to college, whether their child is going to be safe, whether they’re going to have social lives, whether they’re going to have careers,” he says. “It’s something that we as humans fundamentally worry about and think about. Everybody has a different, I think, cultural understanding, but music can still break through all those barriers. So I’m going to continuously just explore and experience things so I can understand how my music can translate to a wider audience.”
Talking about the upcoming album in a separate Instagram post in Chinese, he says:
“Do not fear your true nature. Its light can illuminate heaven and earth. I’ve never shown anyone this side of me. It’s scary being this vulnerable but they don’t know my story behind the pain.”
MUSICAL INFLUENCES
While recording the new album, Olusola was influenced by a diverse range of artists, including Sting, multihyphenate artist Jon Batiste, Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, U.S. singer and actor Harry Belafonte, country-rap artist Shaboozey, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, pianist Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn Jr. and Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Olusola uses his love of classical music as the backdrop to tell his story as a first-generation person growing up in a Western country. He hopes to unlock entry points for those unfamiliar with the classical genre and reach those in and outside the Black diaspora who may still be finding themselves through life’s hardships.
“My purpose is to spread love far and wide with the unique frequency l’ve been given. I want to shatter boundaries, only to bring all the pieces back together with a newfound harmony,” Olusola says. “I hope my music makes you feel comfortable in who you are and the love you want to portray to the world.”
Olusola’s debut solo album, “Dawn of a Misfit,” comes out on May 9, 2025 via Sony Music Masterworks. The record is available to pre-order and pre-save here.
Great article! Love the video