tunesday – life on tour with ben from safia

Indie/electronic trio, SAFIA, have just released their third studio album A Lover’s Guide to a Lucid Dream (which you can listen to down below) so we recently caught up with band member Ben Woolner about the album’s inspiration and sound, as well what it is was like to play music for a live Singaporean audience.

Hiya Ben! How would you describe SAFIA’s sound? I always have trouble answering this question when people ask. It’s honestly a bit of everything, dance, soul, pop, cinematic. A musical collage, I guess.

What’s the best mood to be in for creating music? Without a doubt, we create our best work when we’re relaxed. Not to say you can’t make something great when you’re stressed, but we’re more likely to force things when we’re stressed, and in our experience moving never yields many results.  I swear it was a quality joke.

Where is your favourite place to perform and why? That’s a hard question, my honest answer is I don’t actually know. Every show and place is unique, so they all feel good for different reasons.

Do you prefer performing or songwriting? That’s like choosing a favourite child. Both song-writing and performing give us a feeling that you rarely come across in outside life. Right now, I’d say songwriting, but that’s only because we haven’t been playing a lot of live shows recently. This was the backdrop of our first show in Singapore, not bad at all.

How do you beat a creative block? Being compassionate with yourself is key. I also think you need to be having fun, after all creating is playful in nature. So, if it’s not fun, that might be a good sign that it’s time to take a break, do something different, and return to it later.

You’ve also just released your newest album, A Lover’s Guide to a Lucid Dream. What inspired the name? The name for this record came about very fluidly. It was just a lyric that I wrote, that I thought fitted well phonetically in what is now the title track. However, as the other songs began to take shape and the themes began presenting themselves, it became clear that that phrase seemed to capture the feeling of the record exceptionally well, so it stuck. It took us nearly half an hour to buy tickets to the sky garden using the QR code. I much prefer face-to-face interactions, mainly because I’m inept with a phone. 

What were the influences for this album? We deliberately tried to avoid having many conscious influences on this record. However, in saying that there were probably a few albums we were using as a bar to aim for. Records like Jon Hopkins' Singularity and Weval’s The Weight come to mind.

How does this album differ from your two previous ones? I certainly think it’s a lot more vulnerable than the last two and hopefully more mature. L: It took us nearly half an hour to buy tickets to the sky garden using the QR code. I much prefer face-to-face interactions, mainly because I’m inept with a phone. R: Peak tourist mode.

What was your favourite song to write from this album and why? Writing the title track ‘A Lovers Guide to a Lucid Dream’ was a lot of fun. It was one of those rare songs I could hear almost fully formed in my head. I think because the idea and inspiration were so clear. So it was just a matter of slowly building it up bit by bit

What are you most looking forward to being on tour? We’ve been working with our crew for a long time now so we’re excited to be reunited with our tour family for an extended period of time. I'm also very curious to see how these songs connect in a live setting, they’ve been ours for such a long time so I’m excited to see what they mean to people now that they’re out in the world. One of the more menacing colour palettes from the show.