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

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