Lady Zamar is breaking down the first 10 tracks from her new 20-track album, Monarch. This comes days before the release of her second album. The star shared detailed explanations of the inspiration behind each song. The lead single, This Is Love, has been garnering attention since its release in March.
Image: Lady Zamar IG
Monarch drops on all music sites on 21 June 2019.
Lady Zamar breaks down the first 10 tracks from her new album. Here’s a look at what inspired each song.
1. This is Love: This was one of the most difficult songs to create on the entire album. I chose it as my first song because it is almost like my baby; it is like chapter one. This is the one that says, ‘I’m about to start something new and this is who I am right now’. This is Love basically speaks on the double-sided nature of people. Like when you have something good and it starts going bad, you automatically see something else that is good and say to yourself: ‘I think the grass is greener that side’. Instead, what happens in the song is that the character, who is in between these relationships, finally realizes that the grass is not greener on the other side.
2. Adore: I was in love once upon a time and I was trying to say, ‘Yo, stop chasing money all the time’. I’ve got to say, men have this weird thing where they convince themselves that they need money to get a girl and my whole thing is that if you were crap when you were broke, you’re going to be crap when you have money. You need to develop a good personality and all that kind of stuff. This is like me saying ‘I am your home’ and ‘I adore you’, so stop chasing all the superficial stuff.
SEE ALSO: Lady Zamar announces her sophomore album
3. Be Mine: Be Mine is one of my favourite stories on the album. Imagine you are old and have your grandkids around you and they ask ‘So how did you and granddad get together?’…That’s why I use the lyrics ‘Gather ‘round let me tell you of a time/ Of a time when I knew that you would be mine’. I think having a soul mate is something we do not take seriously. Sometimes you just know that this person is yours, it doesn’t matter how long it takes; you just know this is the person you are going to end up with.
4. Delirium: ‘I heard this song almost a year and a half ago and I loved it! If you listen to the lyrics this is actually a super sexual song. It was so nice to take a concept that no one attaches to a certain sound and attach it to that sound. I feel like the Kwaito era was a very sexy time in our history! As women, we could be what we wanted to be. For example, look at the likes of Lebo Mathosa, she was fearless and sexy.
5. Sunshine: I was extremely in love when I wrote Sunshine. When I fall in love… I fall in love! There is no other way with me. Anyone who knows me knows that I am an extremist of note. You either get 100% or 0. Sunshine was meant to be a summer song and personally, it is one of the most vocally balanced songs on the album. It is very… fluid…and very teenage-like. In a lot of ways, it is like a drug or a very slow poison; in that the first time I heard it, I was like ‘meh’ but the second time it was like ‘Woah, this is so nice’.
6. Donatella: Donatella is an idea. You know the Cinderella effect? …you are in this bad place and then your fairy godmother comes, grants you one wish, then you go to the ball, meet prince charming and at 12 o’clock you need to leave. So, Cinderella in this song is Donatella. You’re my Cinderella and in that moment, I get to experience all this beauty but after that I have to go back to my real life. I think a lot of relationships are like that. We use a lot of people in life. You may be rebounding or in a situation-ship and those are the Donatellas. They are just there to make us feel good in that moment.
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MONARCH ?? Release date: 21st June 2019 https://music.apple.com/za/album/monarch/1468166963
7. I Wish: When I was a little girl and my mom left, I used to stare at the clouds. I didn’t know much about God then and hadn’t had that problem of trying to figure out why we are here; but I would always stare at the sky and think ‘I wish, I wish’. I Wish is that little child in you saying ‘I want’. Making I Wish was a stress and a half. The producers were very hard-headed and their energies were the right ones for a song this powerful. People always say that before something great comes, there is always a lot of opposition and that is very true to this song. I Wish is sort of a continuation of It’s You – Dreaming from King Zamar, where there are a lot of things that we want but we can’t get. What I am trying to communicate in this song is that our minds are the most powerful things that we have. We are the authors of our own fate.
SEE ALSO: Lady Zamar teases her new single This Is Love
8. Destiny: I wrote this song long ago. There are some songs that really connect but and you just don’t know how to put them out into the world. In 2017/18 I was featured on JR’s Feel Good Sessions and in the spur of the moment I performed Destiny. People loved it and some radio stations even took clips of it off YouTube and played it. From there, this movement started to get the track released, it’s almost like people were saying ‘Release the Kraken!’ We worked with the producer Kamera and he somehow managed to get the right production for the song. I just hope the people who were waiting for it love it.
9. More and More: This was the last song we recorded for the album. It’s like a prayer, a desire, a heart cry. It’s the only song that made me cry when I started writing it because I realized in that moment that… this is what I want… what I really want. Even when we were done with it, in the driveway at home, I just burst into tears, just acknowledging the depth of what I had just put out. I hope this song will heal a lot of people. I hope couples will understand that it is a give and take. We often don’t want to admit that we need other people… and I think that is a flawed way of thinking. With More and More I hope to fix that both with myself and everyone else.
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10. Our Process: This is getting into what love really is. In the beginning I say something so simple, ‘Love is a diamond, it’s stronger than ice’. At first that doesn’t make any type of sense until you understand the process of how diamonds are made, versus how ice is made. They look the same but aren’t. Diamonds are love and ice is whatever else looks like it. Ice melts under heat, whereas diamonds never melt, they become stronger with heat. There is another line, ‘love is fury and you are the burn’. In Greek mythology, furies are these creatures that executed justice and if love is justice… we are the consequences of this justice. I used a lot of Greek mythological references in this song because I feel like Ancient Greece was one of the greatest societies that ever existed. They knew how to depict love stories and take us through emotions. I just wanted to get that across in a way that people could relate.