Highlife star singer-songwriter and composer Akwaboah has explained why he cut off his locks after keeping them for “roughly four, five years”.

He said it was “not that expensive” to maintain the hairstyle but he was simply “tired”.

He spoke to Nana Romeo on Okay FM, indicating, also, the different views people held about his looks before and after he cut the hair.

“I woke up one morning – I was tired – because when you go to the salon, they had to release all the hair into afro, and twist it one by one again. This was taking about two to three hours to do – mine wasn’t the permanent one,” Akwaboah said.

“Already, people were also saying the kind of songs I did were calm love songs, and that locks usually go well with Dancehall and those [kind of genres].”

He said he challenged this particular notion, citing international acts who kept locks and sang love songs like the British singer Maxi Priest.

“I could have kept it but when I woke up that morning and I observed I was tired, I cut it off,” the Gangsta Lovin’ hitmaker emphasised.

He said the day he cut his locks off was when he learned while people have various perceptions and expectations of others, an individual had the responsibility of resolutely living by their own philosophy and values.

He told the story of the night he publicly displayed his surprise hair cut.

“I had cut my hair, somewhere in December, and we had to perform at Rapperholic. They all did not know I had cut my hair till that night. When we got on stage the lights were out, so to them, I suddenly appeared. When the light fell on me, we were opening with Hold Me Down. When they saw me, it was a new Akwaboah, with a new haircut, and everything. And I’m telling you, it was as though we were singing the national anthem in the auditorium,” he recalled.

“We like this, this is really nice,” he recalled people’s remarks after his performance.

“When I went to church [however] they were saying, ‘We liked the other one [locks], it was really nice’. Some friends of mine said same. So everybody was giving me different perceptions about what they felt.”

“However,” he underlined, “I sat down and asked myself what I wanted to do despite people’s opinions. So I went with what I felt better [with].”