SOJA is a band who has redefined what modern American reggae can be. With consistently high quality releases over a ten year period, since their first EP, Soldiers of Jah Army, they have managed to walk the fine line of staying true to the ideals of their genre while still delivering fresh and innovative material.
SOJA is a band who has redefined what modern American reggae can be. With consistently high quality releases over a ten year period, since their first EP, Soldiers of Jah Army, they have managed to walk the fine line of staying true to the ideals of their genre while still delivering fresh and innovative material.
Formed in Washington D.C. in 1997, SOJA are coming off of the release of their latest album, Strength to Survive, which dropped in 2012. The album received generally positive reviews and was even named best reggae album of the year by Reggaeville.com.
SOJA will play in Charlottesville on Saturday, October 19th with doors opening at 6PM. The show will also feature opening performances by fellow reggae group Easy Star All Stars and Massachusetts rap-rock duo, Aer.
Tickets for the event can be purchased via the nTellos Wireless Pavilion website.
To preview the show, I spoke with lead singer and guitarist for SOJA, Jacob Hemphill, about the band’s progression over the years, their upcoming new album, and well…just about everything else.
So you guys have a show at the nTellos Wireless Pavilion coming up. Do you guys like playing in Charlottesville?
Yeah I love Charlottesville. People have been telling me for years that the people of Charlottesville kind of…understand, you know? Because Dave Matthews Band is from there and because Red Light Management offices are based there, I think the people of Charlottesville are used to music culture, and you can see it in the fans. And, you know, there’s one-hundred to two-hundred thousand people that live in all those counties around there, like Albermarle and the rest of them, but the Pavilion will hold seven-thousand people. Normally you don’t have a venue that size in that size town. So it shows that people there want to see what’s going on with music. And I was reading somewhere else that Charlottesville was number fourteen on most restaurants per capita. I mean, just crazy little facts about Charlottesville keep coming up you know? It’s a unique place. We dig it a lot for sure.
And you guys are playing shows all over the world. Are there any countries or venues that you really enjoy playing?
Well, I think there’s positives about everywhere we go, and we go all around the world. I don’t think we really have a favorite. I think that there are certain memories that are associated with certain places. We definitely play our biggest shows in South America, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. We do like ten-thousand tickets a night in South America in a lot of places. So when you compare that to the States where we do like two to three thousand, it’s just a big difference. But you know, reggae is more mainstream down there. And political music, and music about change, is more widely accepted. It’s a thought that isn’t uncommon. So I think that plays a pretty big part of it.
Yeah it makes sense that music aimed at pointing out social, political, cultural issues would be bigger down there. South America is definitely a place where a lot of things are happening in those contexts all the time so it does seem that they would be more receptive to that kind of music.
Yeah, their growing too. Brazil is the sixth largest economy in the world and it’s one of the fastest growing. They’re experiencing what we experienced decades ago, which is a government that’s sort of working…unlike our government.
(Laughs) Yeah, not working currently… So, a lot of your lyrics are centered on political, social, and ethical issues that you see in the world. What do you do and what would you encourage others to do, to try and make a difference with those sort of things?
It’s kind of interesting because, the way that I see it, the problems are mentality based…one of the easy things I like to tell people…is to find organizations that you want to donate to. If you have more time than money, try to donate time; if you have more money than time, donate money. But I don’t think it’s really about telling people, it’s about listening, because we want people to figure that stuff out on their own. If I sit here and spout off answers of how to save the world, then I become this ‘intelligent guy’ who thinks he’s a prophet or something. I mean, the problem with telling people these things is that if even one thing I say is incorrect, then people say “oh well everything he said was bullshit, the whole thing’s all false”. People come up with their own solutions, and it can’t really be wrong. All I do is talk about the problems, and I put question marks at the end of everything. I don’t use a lot of periods or exclamation points; that’s my approach.
Very cool. I’ve noticed that a lot of SOJA’s album art incorporates images of a globe, do you want to talk about why that is?
Yeah, the earth is on every album cover, and it’s because it’s the only game in town. With all the things that we talk about, and all the things we can’t figure out, like we can’t figure out same-sex marriage, and we can’t figure out weed laws, and we can’t figure out why we’re losing jobs, and we can’t figure out why Obama can’t get anything passed through congress, and all these things are big deals, but, at the end of the day, if this earth gets four degrees hotter in the next one-hundred something years, everybody’s going to die. To me, it’s the big ticket item, so I always try to put it right there on the cover.
Gotcha. So, to get into the music a little bit, I’ve been listening to you guys for a while now, since Peace in a Time of War, and I’ve noticed that your sound has gotten fuller and more developed, while at the same time it seems like you’ve simplified things a lot in certain places. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you think your sound has changed over the years and where you’ve maybe simplified things in one area as opposed to filling them out in others?
Yeah, that’s a good question. When we started out, like everyone starting out with something new, we were figuring everything out. And as we figured things out, we kind of realized what our strengths were and what our weaknesses were. Once we knew what are strengths were and what are weaknesses were, we started to make sure that the weak parts didn’t slip. We realized that what the band is, is simple. This band is a group of kids who grew up together, in middle school and high school, and we all started a reggae band because we all loved Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and old-school Jamaican reggae bands. We had never heard of any American reggae bands, we had no idea what Sublime was, we just really loved traditional, Jamaican, reggae. And that was the whole deal. We loved what the message was about, and we loved that it seemed bigger than other kinds of music, because these guys were trying to change the world. We started to love it and we started a band.
That’s basically all there is to it, and then, over the years, we would listen to bigger and bigger reggae bands which led to the Bob Marley and The Wailers record produced by Chris Blackwell and Alex Sadkin. What they did is they tried to make this reggae band huge, and they tried to add guitars instead of horns, and female voices instead of male voices, and tried to make it a sound that would appeal on the mainstream. And the reason they were doing it is because they really believed that this guy Bob Marley could change the world, and they wanted the most people possible to hear what he was talking about. That’s the approach that we’ve taken. We want to make music that’s as appealing as possible. Along the way, some of the hardcore roots reggae fans, kind of felt like ‘well what happened to the old sound’? And the truth is, it grew. Sometimes something that seems simpler, seems weaker. But if the simple thing can achieve more results than the complicated thing, the simple thing now become stronger, and the complicated and kind of sporadic thing becomes a weakness. They say in Hawaii don’t take my aloha for weakness. We simplify where we think it fits I guess, to achieve a goal of making the message more acceptable worldwide.
Is it hard to try to simplify things in a big band like yours, where you have so many people contributing to the sound?
We’re lucky in our band. Everybody in our band has a thing that they kind of, are better than the other people at. I think a lot of bands, they kind of get two or three good songwriters who all play guitar, and then they’re like ‘well you’ll be the bass guy, you’ll be lead, I’ll be rhythm and I’ll sing’. I think that happens a lot. Our band, you’ve got me, who writes the song and writes the lead riff, the chords and the melody basically. And then you’ve got a drum and bass team, which is Ryan Berty, Bob Jefferson and Ken Brownell, and they all work together to achieve the rhythm section. So it’s not like there’s a bass line and then there’s a drum line and then there’s a percussion line. The bass and the drums and the percussion are all written to be played at one time. It’s like a three guys playing one instrument type of deal, or three guys playing fifty instruments, depending on how you look at it, but its three guys trying to get one sound. It’s the same for the horns. You’ve got two guys, Hellman Escorcia and Rafael Rodriguez, and they work together to create a horn section. In the end, it’s all built around the song. That’s what’s tough for bands, and that’s why bands have producers, because a producer is one guy and he can go ‘let’s make the song the best it can be’. A band is five guys, or six guys, or seven guys. If you’re the bass player, you try to make the bass line the best that it can be, which probably has nothing to do with making the song the best it can be. So were lucky. It’s not like a chain of command. We’re all trying to achieve one goal, instead of trying to achieve personal goals. I think that’s something that’s really underrated in the success of a band. If you’ve got all the members trying to achieve the same goal in a song, then you get the good stuff I think.
One thing I noticed in Strength to Survive was that your vocals seemed distinctly higher pitched compared to some of the previous albums, was that something that you did intentionally?
Well I thought Strength to Survive was soft. Not soft in a bad way, and not soft like weak or anything. It was just a period of coming together for SOJA. If you listen to that album, it’s only slow songs. People actually gave us a lot of shit for that, because reggae is supposed to be about bouncing around and hanging out at the beach and stuff. On Strength to Survive, there was so many slow songs and there was so much message, that we really just tried to make it as pretty as possible. That was the idea. That’s why we had all those guitars are on there. I didn’t play all those guitars. We had some really good guys in there doing this super clean stuff, because that’s kind of what we were looking for. But the new record were doing now is actually pretty different. It’s ruff and it’s tough. It’s kind of the other side of the Bob Marley record.
Have you guys decided on a title for the upcoming album?
There’s five working titles right now, I have no idea what we’re going to decide on.
Is there anything else you can tell me about what you guys have going on with the new album?
We’re trying to make the definitive reggae album. Which is not different than what we always do. We always try to make the definitive reggae album. Bob Marley, to me, is the greatest musician who ever lived and the Wailers were the best band that ever were. And that’s my opinion but, to me, I’ve already got my blueprint and my role model all set up. That’s not something I have questions about. To make an album like Exodus, or Survival, or Uprising, or Confrontation or any Bob Marley and the Wailers album would be the goal of this thing that I’m talking about. I guess a big difference with the new one is that its more Jamaican. Not in the sense that I have a Jamaican accent or something. It’s more Jamaican in the sense of the approach that we take to produce our record, in developing the sound. It sounds more like something that would come out of Jamaica these days. Not stylistically, but sonically. Strength to Survive sounded American, and this one is going to sound more traditional. It’s tough to explain. You’ll understand when you hear it.
Are you guys playing any songs off of the new album live or are you saving that until the album comes out?
This is going to be the first tour where were playing stuff from the new album so we’re pumped. We’re going to do probably three songs a night. All the sound checks will be just us playing these new songs but we’re pumped. These songs are ridiculously good. Nobody has ever been this excited. This thing is killer.
