SAFIA heads to The Drop
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SAFIA heads to The Drop

SAFIA didn’t knock when they came into our shared musical consciousness, but the soothing and anthemic tune ‘Listen To Soul, Listen To Blues’ didn’t kick the door down either. The brooding track felt like something you’d known for yours, or perhaps it fulfilled the need you didn’t know you had. Since then, the three piece have gone from strength to strength, somehow without ruining the broth as all members are producers.
“With us creativity is pretty interesting. We’re all competent writers and producers, we’ll all have various outlooks of where the song could go. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s hard to navigate through,” vocalist Ben Woolner explains. “Because we’ve known each other for years and years, since primary school, we know how to work together. Once we hit about 50% of the song we come together and put our own pieces into it until it’s done. I think that’s why we end up with songs with so many layers and bits to them, the weirder it is the more likely we are to grab it.”
Although ‘weirdness’ plays a large part in their creative endeavours, taking time to seek out normality and ground themselves has offered the band a chance to re-group before releasing their new single ‘Freakin Out’.
“The last couple of months we had the longest break we’ve probably had since things kicked off for us, at the back end of 2017 we had about five months off. In that time obviously, we’ve been writing and experimenting, developing as many ideas as we can and refining them,” he says.
“Not all songs start the same way, some come from a sound we like or some are more simple where I sit down at the piano and start a chord progression or a melody starts happening when I jamming or noodling around. But there are some songs where I’ll be walking along, and I start singing something.”
What Ben may call weird, others may call multifaceted with an unpredictable nature. Tomato/Tomato. SAFIA’s albums are the phoenix in the fire, where on the first listen you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ashes on the next track. Weird, multifaceted and exciting.
“Songs like that, the ones that just start in your head can be the most fun. Like on the last record, ‘Over You’, were waiting in a venue for an hour before we could sound check and started doing this funny Russian Melody. That ended up being the guitar riff, I started singing as a joke put the phone on to record.”
Three months later the guys were working in London with producers where they faced the challenge of having to write a song a day. Towards the end of the mammoth week-long writing session they found their minds somewhat strained, which is where weird has an upside.
“I pulled the phone out and the guys there were like “woah, we like that!”. So, it turned into this weird soul-hip hop almost circus-like track.”
SAFIA will be joining the likes of the Dune Rats and San Cisco on The Drop Tour, which follows the WSL Pro tour to Australia’s best surf spots.
“Playing live, that’s where all the weirdness and sporadic stuff makes a lot more sense.”
When & Where: Torquay Common, Torquay – March 31.
For tickets head to moshtix, phone 1300 GET TIX (438 849), or local outlets (visit our website for a full list of outlets in your area).

Written by James Mac