Loah

Photo by The Naked Studio.

Ethan Hawke said it best when he remarked how poetry best serves us in confusing times. The once-in-a-lifetime COVID-19 pandemic upended everybody’s lives all over the world, to a degree that it’ll take years to comprehend. One of those people is my dear friend, Sallay-Matu Garnett (aka Loah), a celebrated Irish/Sierra Leonean musician who only knows how to push boundaries with her songwriting. Prior to the pandemic, Sallay was meant to move to New York to further build upon her music career, especially after the city has grown to become a second home to her. Rather than grow bitter at being stuck in Ireland, she turned to poetry to not only make sense of her internal feelings but to find words that could attempt to describe our “new normal” This exploration lead to the crafting of her upcoming EP, When I Rise Up, a series of songs which take poems from the 1920s and re-contextualizes them for our modern age. The EP showcases Loah’s dynamic range as an instrumentalist as she sings the words of Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gladys Casely-Hayford, Eva Gore-Booth, W.B. Yeats, and Katharine Tynan.

While experiencing these songs I also found myself struck by the power of poetry, explicitly the ways these poets were able to describe the fight for civil rights, gender equality and LGBT struggles in such vivid detail that is both remarkable and harrowing how timeless these words remain to be. On this episode I chat with Sallay about the process of re-imagining these poems into songs, the ways 2020 changed our perspectives on life and again; how poetry can provide solace in confusing times.

Follow Loah on Bandcamp, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.