GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter Somi has announced her new album What Does It Take to Bloom? out on August 7 via Salon Africana. A two-time NAACP Image Award winner and Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, her first collection of original songs in six years is an exploration into the ongoing process of staying faithful to oneself amid life’s dissonance. Written and recorded between Dakar, Lagos, Paris and New York City, the album weaves global sensibilities into an intimate meditation on uncertainty and change — asking whether growth is something we recognize as it’s happening, or once we’ve already been transformed.
Somi shares the first single ‘We’re All Falling,’ one of the project’s most affecting songs, that confronts mortality with striking clarity. Written during a season of personal loss, the song reflects on the sobering awareness that life is fragile and time is finite. Yet it is not consumed by despair. It becomes a call for grace and an invitation to live in the moment.
When asked about the album, she said “I wrote this body of work while traversing many places and losing many people. This album is a mirror of searching for where and how to take root in spite of that. I pray these songs offer each listener a sense of Home or, at the very least, a witnessing of me coming Home to myself.”
What Does It Take To Bloom?:
- Throw Something
- Sometimes Love (ft. The Cavemen)
- What Does It Take to Bloom?
- Mama On Blooming
- So You Want to Be a Woman (ft. Lakecia Benjamin)
- Aiwah
- Sugar
- Mama On Tradition
- Ngayaya
- Lay It Down
- Interlude: Skin To Skin
- We’re All Falling
- Love Could Be Anywhere
