Asa releases ‘Bed of Stone’

The 47 minute-long album is made up of 14 tracks, including ‘Dead Again,’ ‘Eyo,’ ‘Satan be gone,’ ‘Bed of stone,’ ‘Moving on,’ ‘Grateful,’ ‘Society,’ ‘How did love find me,’ ‘Ife’, ‘Situation,’ ‘New Year,’ ‘The one that never comes,’ ‘Sometimes I wonder’ and ‘Shine your light’. According to asa-official.com: “Never has Asa’s voice been so precise […]

The 47 minute-long album is made up of 14 tracks, including ‘Dead Again,’ ‘Eyo,’ ‘Satan be gone,’ ‘Bed of stone,’ ‘Moving on,’ ‘Grateful,’ ‘Society,’ ‘How did love find me,’ ‘Ife’, ‘Situation,’ ‘New Year,’ ‘The one that never comes,’ ‘Sometimes I wonder’ and ‘Shine your light’.
According to asa-official.com: “Never has Asa’s voice been so precise and emotionally pure.
“She still has all the melodic grace she’s always been known for, but this time, it’s more troubling than ever. The songs on her new album ‘Bed of Stone,’ say much more than the emotions of Bukola Elemide, known as Asa.”
It also said her songs say a lot about our melancholy, our dreams, our thoughts and our reflections. “It almost feels like they have been part of our lives even before Asa wrote and sang them,” it said.
Actually, they were born from her life and the shock she felt coming off the road in 2012, after an incredibly long tour. “I needed time to pull myself together. I toured for two years, gave everything I had every single night. I had been the girl that was full of life, force and energy that people looked at for two hours on stage, and then congratulated backstage after the show. But I was going home alone, never really realising how exhausting all that actually is…” she was quoted as saying.
The site revealed that after her last tour, she just couldn’t stay home, so she travelled and she wrote. Lagos, Berlin, USA, London, Paris. “I wanted to feel human again. Meet new people and do everything I always wanted to do before I hit 30. I wanted to learn to swim, rent a car and drive from Nashville to New York and from New York to Los Angeles and I wanted to learn to skateboard and drive a motorcycle.”
While doing this, she wrote new songs. The recording took place in various locations after the originally intended producer didn’t work out in Los Angeles. She left for Hastings in East Sussex to work with Blair MacKichan, a songwriter and producer who had worked with Will Young and Lilly Allen.
Asa’s life is part of her songs as much as our life is part of her songs. The inexhaustible subject that is love, the spiritual calling, the need to party or to simply share a cup of tea with two friends…and there’s ‘Dead Again,’ the first single, written in two hours with Blair MacKichan, based on a close friend’s treason that angered Asa.
‘Love Found Me’ is a song about having to stop looking for love because it found you, a premonitory song written shortly before the start of the recording.
‘Grateful’ is a beautiful hymn of grace beyond any religious considerations that invites you to look to the maker. Then there is ‘Satan Be Gone,’ based on a New Orleans rhythm, speaking of the battles against the horned one, alcohol and hate. ‘Eyo,’ written in Paris and borrowing a melody for the Masks Parade in Lagos, a place where the streets know how to smile.
All that say the talented Asa, and the road that she travelled.
“I’ve matured,” says the soon to be 32-year-old artiste, in total control of her art and her emotions. “The energy, the weakness, the jubilation, the despair… A glorious summit!”
This year, it was reported that before the release of ‘Bed of Stone,’ Asa sold 400,000 albums worldwide.