Lanre Dabiri, popularly known as eLDee The Don started down the path to a prosperous music career in 1998.
He and his high school friend, Kaboom teamed up with Freestyle to create the Trybesmen group. This led eLDee to create his own independent record label, Trybe Records to support the group. In 1999, the group took the Nigerian music industry by storm after they released two hits, “Trybal Marks” and “Shake Bodi” off their “L.A.G Style Volume 1” album.
eLDee’s Trybe Records soon grew beyond the group and they created an impressive lineup of artists including Shasha P, 2 Shots and Dr Sid. He came up with a collaboration of all the artists on the record label and called them ‘Da Trybe’. They went on to release some of the biggest hits of the early 2000s, including “Work It Out” and “Oya” in 2002. Eldee also produced the collaborative album for Da Trybe in 2005 titled “Big Picture”.
In 2002, Eldee moved to Atlanta, USA but kept on releasing music and working with Da Trybe. He released his solo debut album, “Long Time Coming” in 2004. The album addressed the split of his group, Trybesmen on certain songs like “Speak Out” and “Run Dem Mouth”. It also featured one of his most popular solo singles, “Me I Go Yarn”.
He followed up the album with “Return of The King” in 2006. The album earned him various nominations and awards for both videos and songs, including the Nigerian Entertainment Award for “Best International Album”.
He told Bella Naija in an interview that he had left the country to gain a better experience. He said, “My reason for leaving Nigeria in the first place was to grow professionally. I felt like I had hit the ceiling of exposure and professional growth in Nigeria and it was time to move on to bigger challenges.”
After a short-lived move back to Nigeria in 2008, he released his third album, “Big Boy” that was originally called ‘Evolution’. In 2008, he married his girlfriend of 10 years, with whom he now has two beautiful daughters, Temi and Toke. When they celebrated their 10 years as a married couple in 2018, his wife, Dolapo took to Instagram to celebrate him. She said, “Thank you for being both my rock and my cozy comforter. I feel safe with you. Here’s to US!! I love you. Happy Anniversary my darling…..to infinity and beyond”.
In 2010, he dropped yet another album, “Is It Your Money?” and racked up producer credits on Goldie’s “You know it”, LKT’s “Bamijo”, and Sauce Kid’s “Sinzu is Sinzu”. He finally released his fifth and final album, “Undeniable”, a contemporary African album in 2012. Eldee described it as, “different from my previous albums because I decided to take a fresh and truly original stab at what contemporary African music should sound like today”.
After years at the top of the Nigerian music industry as a producer and rapper, Eldee made a conscious decision to take a bow from pursuing music as his full-time career in 2012. He told Punch in a recent interview that he had to take a step back from music to make time for family and because the business side was no longer working for him.
He said, “I made a conscious decision not to be an active musician in 2012. It wasn’t like I was trying and it wasn’t working. I realised that with the path that my music was taking me, I wouldn’t have time for my family and they are more important”. He continued, “the other businesses I was doing outside of music was making more money for me at the time so I didn’t even need a forecast to make that decision; I realised music was taking 80 per cent of my time and the other things I was doing with my remaining 20 per cent were bringing in more money.”
In 2015, eLDee launched his passion project, Playdata. The broadcast monitoring service was created to track content for artists and other content creators to see how much airplay it gets when it’s aired, who is playing it, and get more compensation from airplay. At the third edition of the Nigerian Entertainment Conference, he explained the importance of monetizing airplay. He said, “If I’m creating something, I’m creating some kind of value, then I should be compensated for it… I think that it’s important also that we understand what we are monetizing, how we are monetizing, and who we are compensating. And also encouraging the younger artists who typically get overlooked and actually compensate them as they deserve to be.”
Eldee’s decision to leave the music scene has worked out great for him. He and his family are currently in the US and he is working as an IT Consultant.