Archive entry · NB-0005
Am Leaving
Nubian Beats
Cinematic · 4:22 · 75 BPM
Description
**“I’m Leaving”** tells the story of a woman who has spent years carrying far more than her share of a marriage. She works, pays the bills, raises the children and holds the household together while her husband becomes increasingly comfortable being carried. The dynamic followed them from Africa, where traditional expectations and male social authority could sometimes conceal just how unequal the arrangement had become, into a very different reality in Toronto. Here, she works two jobs while he struggles to keep even one. What was once tolerated slowly becomes impossible to ignore. Eventually exhaustion gives way to clarity. “I’m Leaving” is not primarily a revenge song. It is the sound of someone reaching the end of endurance and recovering the part of herself that disappeared beneath responsibility. The song moves from hurt and fatigue toward confidence and liberation, culminating in the simple realization that loving someone does not require carrying them forever.
The story behind the song
The story of **“I’m Leaving”** began long before its final recording. The original R&B beat was produced for Nubian Beats approximately sixteen years before the finished version of the song. At its center were haunting bells treated with reverb and delay, gradually joined by cello and a growing rhythmic arrangement. Even in instrumental form, the music seemed to carry the feeling of someone enduring something for too long before finally reaching a breaking point. Years later, the beat found its story. The woman at the center of the song is a burden bearer. She has spent years doing what needed to be done: working, caring for the children, paying bills, maintaining the household and repeatedly compensating for a husband who has become dependent upon her labor. The visual concept developed around a simple metaphor. At the beginning of the story, her young child draws a picture of his mother as a **donkey**. When she laughingly asks why, he innocently answers that it is because Mama works so much. The observation hurts because it is true. As the song progresses, the child's drawings begin to change. The donkey develops stronger hind legs, feline characteristics and eventually becomes a powerful wild cat. At the same time, the woman begins seeing subtle traces of the same transformation within herself. The donkey represents endurance: the creature that carries the load and keeps walking. The wild cat represents what comes next: boundaries, instinct, dignity and power. By the end, she has not become cruel. She has simply stopped volunteering to be somebody else's beast of burden. She leaves. And this time, she carries only what belongs to her.