Track By Track: SOJA _Poetry In Motion_
Hiroki Nishiokia
“We make music for the fans,” SOJA lead singer and principal songwriter Jacob Hemphill explains. “We’re not one of those groups that’s trying to do something exclusively for us. We’re trying to create music that ends up helping people. And if we can do that, then it feels like we’re doing what we’re supposed to do.”
The eight-piece group once again set out with that in mind when they entered Haunted Hollow Studio in Charlottesville, Va., to record Poetry in Motion. “We were sitting on about 20 songs, and playing them over the course of maybe two years,” says the SOJA frontman. “We decided to do it with just us. As we progress as a band, we do more with outside musicians and producers and singers, and all of this stuff starts getting added. On this one, just the band went into the studio, and we played music for each other, so we could all add our input the whole time. We made it as if we were kids again.”
This final sentiment is certainly fitting, as the band members first came together as high-school students in Arlington, Va. When SOJA started out in 1997, they were a roots-reggae act, although the group now incorporates elements of Latin, rock, hardcore and hip-hop. In addition to Hemphill, their current lineup features Robert “Bobby Lee” Jefferson (bass), Ryan Berty (drums), Kenneth Brownell (percussion), Patrick O’Shea (keyboards), Hellman Escorcia (saxophone, aerophone), Rafael Rodriguez (trumpet) and Trevor Young (guitar, harmony vocals).
As for the theme of this album, Hemphill discloses, “All of our other records were about something specific. Born in Babylon was about rich versus poor. Strength to Survive was about humans versus the earth. Amid the Noise and Haste was about time versus life. And the new one, Poetry in Motion, is trying to pull all of the themes into one thing, and say that, whether it’s good or bad, there’s something beautiful about everything. It’s kind of a simple message on this one.”
MOVING STONES
“Moving Stones” is about having something in your life that you know is bad. And it’s also about how simple it is to get rid of that thing. But the human condition makes us sort of postpone getting rid of that thing—the same thing that makes us want to accumulate and last forever weirdly makes us postpone it in our day-to-day life.
I CAN’T STOP DREAMING
This is a continuation of a song from the last record called “Lucid Dreams.” The thing about lucid dreams is that they keep coming back over and over. They come and go, but they’re always sort of there. So I kind of thought to myself that, as my own dreams had changed, maybe I should keep writing this song and changing it.
A lucid dream works like this: You know you’re dreaming, unlike normal dreams. And you can sort of control yourself, but there’s stuff that comes in from all different sides that reminds you that you’re definitely dreaming and that this isn’t real. And when you wake up, you sort of want to do something about it, as if you were learning something in there. So for me, the song is worth writing over and over again. I’ll probably write more of these.
TRIED MY BEST
“Tried My Best” is about being in the band. The first verse is talking about this feeling. It’s weird—ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had these two feelings. One of them is this house on a hill with a tree, a chimney, a window that’s glowing and a door that’s inviting you into this place. There are only like six colors—it’s really simple and it feels good, like peace. And then I have this other dream, which is every color, noise and action you could think of all in one thing. It feels like fear. And those mental images have always been behind what I’m writing in one way or another.
The song starts, “I feel it when my dreams tear right into my soul.” I’m sort of quoting “I Can’t Stop Dreaming” and saying it’s a feeling that won’t go away. From there, I start
And then I say in the chorus: “The only thing that ever made sense is when I can feel it.” So I’m talking about the feeling. But it’s a feeling I can’t describe, so in the next line I say, “The only thing that ever made sense is just to carry and conceal it all.” That’s the right to carry a handgun, a carry-and-conceal license. So I’ve turned the feeling into a weapon. And then I say, “I’m still doing it now”—the dream hasn’t gone anywhere.
Then the next verse describes the band, and how we’re “floating down the concrete” in our tour bus: “Flying in the sky, I think we found the bloodstream of our life.” The veins in your arm are like the veins on a leaf. And if you zoom out on the earth that we tour, the roads look like veins. That’s the bloodstream of our life, the band and the road that they’re on. And then I say, “Play me in the particle,” as if we’re all part of this thing— I’m not different than the bloodstream and the trees and all of that. And then I say, “Put me in the mix.” That’s a phrase in reggae about switching the dancehall rhythm real quick. But when I say it, I mean more like, “Put me in the mix of the particles in the bloodstream.” Then, I look back to those early days when I was a kid and first experienced the light.
MORE
“More” is about accumulation. We’ve come up with this solution. When you’re warm, dry, fed and rested after being hungry and tired and wet and cold, you go from unhappy to happy. There’s this documentary, I AM, that’s all about that. Humans think that’s the secret to happiness: to have twice as much. It’s the big lie of capitalism. Not that I’m inherently against capitalism, but it’s a big trick. There’s a gimmick to what we’re doing in our day-to-day lives, and we all buy into it in some way or another. Even if you’ve figured out a bunch of stuff, we still sort of buy into this accumulation theory that never works. So the song is just breaking it down and asking, “What if it wasn’t like that?”
“Fire in the Sky” was written when I was sitting in an airport and a member of the band lost someone. In the first verse, a person is very confused, like, “What the hell is all this for? We all just leave.” The narrator starts to figure out that there’s something to this—a pessimism of “What the hell is all of this for?” And then, in the chorus, he starts to be like, “Wait a minute. What is all of this for?” The seat that he’s sitting in changes, but he’s saying the same thing.
EVERYTHING TO ME
This song’s about my dad. I lost him a few years back, and we were best friends. So I had all of these songs that were really sad about him. Every time I would finish one, I would think that it didn’t feel right. And then, I wrote one that was really happy, and it felt right. So that’s the song—missing him in a good way and telling him that I love him.
LIFE SUPPORT
While “Fire in the Sky” is saying the glass is half full, in “Life Support,” it’s half empty. “Life Support” suggests that we are a broken world. We operate in a way where we’re like cancer, but not benign—we’re malignant cancer. Benign cancer takes only what it needs, and you live with this little bump forever. But malignant cancer takes more than it needs, it kills you and then it dies. But it only had to take a little bit. “Life Support” is saying that’s us. We’re in the hospital, and we’re not going to make it. It’s dumb, what we’re doing. We’re taking too much.
BAD NEWS
We just had a really polarizing election. And it makes it very easy for any American, or anyone worldwide, to be like, “Oh, this is my side. This is where I stand.” And it doesn’t really matter who the president is. We learned that watching Obama; he was a genius and nothing happened. So, to me, all that stuff sounds like hype. The real issue is: Can people get along with each other? Can this country move in a good direction? Can we make sure that we are represented as Americans and as citizens of the world? Can we make sure that our government works for us? Now, the answer to all that stuff is “no.” That’s the only political song we did on the album. Normally, we do a ton, but politics just seems to be separating everyone now, which is way worse than who won the thing.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
That is Bobby Lee’s song—he’s had it for a while. We put it on an old record called Stars & Stripes and we’ve been playing it ever since. And all the guys in the band—Hellman especially—wrote all these crazy new parts, and it’s just changed so much that we were like, “Hey, we’ve gotta put that thing on the record.”
I met Bobby Lee in first grade. When I was seven, I moved to the states from Africa and I didn’t know anybody. My parents were going through a divorce, and if you’re a little kid, all that stuff is terrifying. I got into first grade and there was this one kid who was telling jokes the entire time, and the teacher made him turn his desk around. And I thought to myself: “I should know that guy;” and that was that. When we were about 13 or 14, we started doing talent shows in middle school. And then, by the time we went to high school, we were done with the talent shows and we wanted to start a band.
SING TO ME
“Sing to Me” was written for Trevor ‘cause that guy’s really in love with guitars—playing guitar, having guitars. That’s his whole thing. So I wrote him a love song about a guitar. The point of the song is that, no matter how much I drop or break these things, it always just sings to me, which is probably the way some people feel about the person that they love. Maybe they’re not always great to them, but this person has all of this love for them. When we were planning to figure out how to play it, I sang the first verse and then we were like, “Let’s duet this thing.” And then that was it.
I FOUND YOU
“I Found You” is the ending to the record. It’s thanking all the fans and everyone who works behind the scenes. This has been amazing, and it’s still going on and it’s really cool.
This article originally appeared in the January/February issue of Relix.
