“It’s Alright” by Sofi Gev – A Song Feature

 

     “It’s Alright” pushes serious subject matter into the discussion, but with an innocence in the vocals and sprinklings of both angst and reassurance in the lyrics. Sofi Gev explains:
  “I wrote ‘It’s Alright’ as a playful take on some of our fears and anxieties, real and imagined. But while we worked on the production, the pandemic began to spread and the lyrics started to feel eerily relevant. Hopefully it can spread a little lighthearted fun in a scary, weird time.”
 
     Sofi Gev is the performance name of Hannah Lovelady of Salt Lake City, Utah. She identifies her earliest and most enduring musical influence as the nighttime singing of Joni Mitchell songs by her father. That influence shines bright in “It’s Alright.” The Sofi Gev song runs parallel to Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (“Paved paradise and put up a parking lot”), since they both seem pleasant despite putting a voice to concerns about personal wellbeing and the planet’s future. Mitchell goes so far as to end her song with laughter. But a major difference between the songs is that the big yellow taxi took Mitchell’s “old man” away, while Sofi Gev has someone who reassures her, “I’ll be here by your side / So, it’s alright.”
 
     “It’s Alright” is a rule-breaker in a genre that typically pursues melodic predictability over all else. The instrumentation is pleasantly melodic, but during the verses, the vocal style of Sofi Gev is more staccato than smoothly melodic. This is best appreciated in the line “Does that require my attention span?” in which the last syllable almost seems to be an afterthought. Becoming comfortable with this rule-breaking style might be an inherent effect of her early practice of “honing her sense of melody by singing the words of recipes from cookbooks  while accompanied by her father playing acoustic guitar.”
 
     “It’s Alright” by Sofi Gev   

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Website: https://sofigev.com/

Bandcamp: https://sofigev.bandcamp.com/ 

Lyrics of “It’s Alright” by Sofi Gev (with some errors)
Living in a world that’s frightening
Worry keeping me up nightly
Monster sitting on my chest
Medicate so I can get some rest
 
Showing up to work on Monday
Pop-up ads tell me I’ll get old someday
Guess I’ll need a pension plan
Does that require my attention… span?
 
You wake me up from bad dreams
No time to run from those things now
I said the world might end tonight
You said I’m by your side
So, it’s alright
 
Fossil fuel and solar flairs
Swimming lessons for the polar bears
Little green men on a ship
After these on(?) the apocalypse
 
You wake me up from bad dreams
No time to run from those things now
I said the world might end tonight
You said I’m by your side
 
All the funny things are gone (?)
The worries for the birds
There’s nothing wrong
 
You wake me up from bad dreams
Don’t even wanna sleep right now
You said I am your world tonight
I’ll be here by your side
So, it’s alright