Take 5 With Ofri
Sydney based songweaver Ofri recently released her highly anticipated debut album ‘That Heavy Magnetism’, which was premiered exclusively by us. Today, Ofri has shared with us her 5 favourite tracks of the minute and why.
Fiona Apple is easily my favourite artist of all time and it’s not even close. I’ve been listening to her for over a decade now, and the one thing that always impresses me about her music is that as I gain experiences, her songs take on new meanings, or maybe their meaning is clarified. Werewolf is one of those songs. It’s not her most typical song – it isn’t angry or guttural like some of her more iconic moments – but its intimacy makes it even more visceral to me than her harsher tracks. It has this really tender message about letting go of relationships that don’t serve you, and not being bitter about it. ‘Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key’ might as well be a life motto for me, and stands out amongst her more dense metaphors as something painfully, beautifully obvious. It hits different.
There’s nothing quite like singing ‘Helplessness Blues’ as loudly as you possibly can. The songwriting is absolutely breathtaking, from the universality of its concept to the specificity of its storytelling. Listening to it makes me feel like I’m being gently told, “hey, everyone feels like this sometimes,” and singing along to it gives me such cathartic joy. The switch-up halfway through is also incredible – it feels like stepping out of a fog, and I really admire the frankness of Robin Pecknold’s lyrics here, maybe because frankness is something I always strive for, but struggle quite a lot to achieve. Basically, this song has solidified itself into my psyche like molten gold into a cast.
The production! The build! I think Natalie managed to balance the slow-build-to-climax in this song in a way that so many people try but fail to achieve. To me, she manages to beautifully encapsulate what I think is a really common desire: to be seen with as much admiration as the people in the movies. When the arpeggiated synth motif becomes a string section during the finale, it’s like a plunge into a cold ice bath; a shock to the system and a rush of adrenaline. And her voice! So unique, so much drama, such great delivery. She has so much gravity when she sings, it makes me feel like I’m on another, more massive planet. Seeing her perform this live at the Sydney Opera House last year felt like an actual life-changing moment, and might have even been the first domino to fall in my eventual decision to fully commit myself to music.
I saw Punch Brothers live in concert a few years back, and it’s still one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. They have this way of making even their most delicate moments their most impactful, and this song is no exception. ‘Familiarity’ lives in my head rent-free and has been with me through many life-defining moments. I actually recently discovered I quoted it in my album opener ‘Redshift’ without realising (isn’t it funny how ideas stick to our brains like that?). I was almost too embarrassed to admit that once I realised, but ‘Familiarity’ is one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite bands of all time, so it just had to be on this list.
I think Adrianne Lenker is probably one of the greatest songwriters currently living. She writes beautifully, but never pretentiously, and it inspires me so much that her songs can be so simple yet so rich. Big Thief on the whole is so incredibly solid, they have such great chemistry and it really feels like they’re able to capture the spirit of Adrianne’s songs and express them in their totality. In reality, this could just as easily be any other Big Thief song, but I ended up picking Simulation Swarm out of the myriad other possibilities because I love its melody and momentum, as well as the really vivid image that Adrianne conjures through the song’s central metaphor (I’m someone who struggles to visualise things so I find this is a pretty rare thing for a song to achieve).
