Listen to “Novena Sarafina!” on Spotify or your favourite streaming service.
Back in 2000, we chose Novena Sarafina! as the lead song for our album “Farmers & Artists”. Here’s how the song came about:
I believe it was Paul who had come up with the title, he will tell us in another posting how this happened. For me “Novena Sarafina!”, meant “New Celebration”, but lyrically I just let my stream of consciousness pave the way. I had a few dreams about this song and incorporated them into the lyrics.
For the first verse, the narrator (“Me”), seems a bit confused and is in a daze. I liked the contrasts, “Hot damn, it’s cold December”, etc.
The “Pharoahs” line was mostly from a dream I had where I was a pharoah with arrows (i think there were arrows). Maybe for those that believe in reincarnation, this is stuff they dream about too, I don’t think I believe in reincarnation.
The second verse was completely unrelated, I was imagining seeing someone’s aura rise, after they died. There was a book out at the time called “The Celestine Prophecy”, I read parts of it, but didn’t really believe the contents, but I thought, what if you did believe in it, and actually imagined seeing this after someone passed on. Anyways, I really like the DNA line here.
In the last pre-chorus, there’s a line that goes like this: “All my old friends would sell me clothes, just like a hollow open disjointed nose”, that nose is Paul’s, who somehow had injured his nose once, and referred to it this way.
Anyways, the meaning of the song and everything I haven’t written about are really up to interpretation. If anything I just wrote out these lines and re-wrote them until i was happy with the way the words sounded in the end, the meaning really is up to the listener.
Thanks for listening <3!
-Mike
