INTERVIEW: Wafia on her debut album Promised Land: “I’ve made a love song for all the most important people in my life”
Words: Emma Driver
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Sherrie Garcia
Published 4 March 2025
Wafia’s debut album Promised Land has been ten years in the making, and it’s ten years well spent. The LA-based singer-songwriter, who was born in the Netherlands, grew up in Australia and comes from a Syrian-Iraqi family, has travelled far – and it shows in the depth of her songwriting and the delicacy of her voice on this beautiful album.
Wafia – born Wafia Al-Rikabi – released her first EP, XXIX, back in 2015. It featured the song ‘Heartburn’, a melancholy slow-burner that launched her as a unique singer with a light touch and a thoughtfulness all her own, marrying lush pop textures with lyrics that explore all corners of human feeling. More singles and EPs followed, letting her explore not just inner but external lives. The single ‘Bodies’, in 2017, was inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis that was affecting her own family, all wrapped up in a pop song that can be read in many different ways: “Something in the air is dangerous / Everybody here is watching us / … We’re just bodies in the night.”
Here is her thoughtfulness again, and it’s this quality that always makes Wafia’s music stand apart from other pop in a similarly quiet vein – as well as her supple, crystal-clear voice that never fails to deliver a story and a mood. Her 2020 EP Good Things was a musical breakthrough, which paired the turmoil of songs like ‘Hurricane’ and ‘How to Lose a Friend’ with the skipping piano rhythms and liberation of ‘Pick Me’ (“When you’re holding me down, I’ll get up and leave / I pick me”). Its release coincided with an important time of growth for Wafia; living in the US without her family, she found her music and perspective evolving in new directions.
That process has culminated in Promised Land, an album Wafia says she couldn’t have made when she was a younger songwriter still living in Australia. From the opening bars of the prequel track ‘The Summer Was Sweet’, a shaky, off-kilter piano tells us this will be an album that explores all the emotional edges. Then comes ‘Vision of Love’, a song Wafia says was written for her mother, which introduces a crisp, almost Hawaiian guitar texture and Wafia’s singular voice doing its sweet storytelling thing.
Songs like ‘Background’ and ‘Big Thoughts’ take a more regular rhythm and turn into catchy pop gems, with ‘Big Thoughts’ especially having a singable festival quality that Wafia says she wanted from the track. Others are infused with gentle R&B touches (‘Something’, ‘Read Me’) and dream-pop (‘Say It to the Moon’, ‘Dragonfly’), with underpinnings of folk-tinged guitar that anchor the tracks lightly and letting them breathe (‘Mulberry Tree’, ‘House Down’).
‘Dragonfly’ is the album’s centrepiece, a song that takes inspiration from the journeys across the globe of Wafia’s own family. “I’ll search every sea / Until you have a soft place to land,” she sings, and the song’s slower tempo emphasises the length of those journeys. Wafia’s voice slides ever higher, giving it all an airy quality of sky and distance.
Executive-produced by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Sabrina Claudio, Promised Land feels like the culmination of all Wafia’s experiences and her finely honed sense of what makes beautiful pop. On its release, Women In Pop’s Jett Tattersall talked with Wafia about key tracks and ideas across the album, plus some turning points in her musical life until now.
Congratulations on Promised Land – it’s such a feast of an album.
Thank you!
Let’s talk a little bit about some of the standouts on Promised Land. ‘Distant’ is a really beautiful song. It’s stripped back and layered all at the same time. There is some real intensity on the album, and lushness, and softer lullaby moments, but this song is just very “other”.
That was one of the songs that I’d been sitting on for so long. And I thought, “Maybe this song is just impossible to put out. Maybe it’s impossible to produce.” Everyone kept telling me, anyone I toured the album to, was like, “This song is so special.” So I realised, ‘Okay, I have to just trust the original vision I wrote it with.’
It’s gorgeous. Now, let’s talk about ‘Big Thoughts’. It’s so clean and snappy, despite the fact that you’re dealing with how to not spiral into magical thinking of destruction.
Yes, I do that a lot! It was one of the last songs I made for the record. I was really inspired by the music I grew up listening to in my formative years, particularly Vampire Weekend, Phoenix, Two Door Cinema Club – indie kind of music. And I spent a lot of time growing up in Australia going to these festivals. And I wanted something I can play at these festivals that feels like that. So we came up with ‘Big Thoughts’. The concept was really inspired. I struggle a lot with very severe PMS – it’s a whole other thing called PMDD. Me and my partner have this saying around that: “No more big thoughts. You’ve exhausted your brain. Stop thinking!” And I’d said that in the session that we needed to simplify it – like, no more big thoughts. Someone said, ‘That’s actually a great song idea.’
Then I had this idea to marry it with a world of falling in love really quickly and just trying to not overthink it and simplify it. And I felt like that idea, plus this indie inspiration, all sort of came together that day in a way that I was looking really, really looking for on the record.
It’s full of joy and pace – of pushing hard feelings aside so you can have a dance for a hot minute.
Totally. Especially towards the end, I was just having fun with it. Sometimes, from a place of safety, you can take the biggest risks. Like: “What am I going to make for fun today?”
We get a lot of albums that are about love or relationships, but this one feels like you’ve cracked open your chest and written songs about all the different kinds of love. ‘Vision of Love’ is one of them – it’s like a beautiful summer walk.
I think that’s a really accurate way of putting it. I think, without realising it, I’ve made a love song for all the most important people in my life on this album. It makes sense that my first real, big body of work would have that. ‘Vision of Love’ is for my mother – I’m finally understanding my mother after years of banging my head against the wall!
‘Dragonfly’ is a song that plays a huge role sonically on this album. Talk to me a little bit about the symbolism of dragonflies to you and this album.
I was so inspired by them, particularly their migration patterns. Dragonflies have an intergenerational migration pattern. They start at point A, and to get to point B, they die, but their offspring takes over for them. And this happens maybe two or three times for them to get to point B. And I started thinking myself in that way. I’m at point B, but it took my parents moving to Australia for me to move to the US. And then, and then I realised that maybe I’m not even the last dragonfly in this. I don’t even know what the full migration path is like; I could be the one in the middle, or I could be the one in the beginning, if you zoom out.
I just started thinking of my parents’ migration and even my family’s. On my father’s side, my family are from a nomadic tribe back in Iraq, back when nomadic tribes still were nomads. So migration has always been in my DNA, even before politics, borders, diaspora, third cultures became a thing, or before my people had language for that. I also find a lot of relief in finding patterns in nature … it’s a way to just not take things so personally. For me, that is helpful.
When everything becomes all-consuming, it’s just something that tethers you?
It also makes you feel like, “Okay, I didn’t actually have much choice in the matter”, or that the choices I made were instinctual, so therefore there aren’t bad choices to be made. For me, again, it takes the burden of getting it wrong off the table.
Speaking of migration and where you’re going, let’s talk about your trajectory in the industry. Your album has taken some slog to get here. There’s the emotional work, and the musical work – do you imagine it would have sounded like this had you gotten it out maybe five, six years ago?
No, no way! I mean, half these songs weren’t written then and I don’t know that I had the wisdom or the space, or a lot of the themes. I had been touring a lot at that point, but I hadn’t moved away from home. People then would ask me, “Have you lived alone?” I’d be, like, “Yeah, I’m on tour all the time.” But it’s just not the same thing. I moved away, and then, of course, the pandemic happened. It really forced me to have to pick where to be, and to have all this space between me my family. So there’s just no way I could have written these songs five years ago. I also think I’ve evolved a lot as a songwriter. It’s a lot more introspective and nuanced than it might have been five years ago. Not that one is better than the other, but it is just where I’m at now.
Do you have any particular moments of reactions that anyone shared with you when you thought, ‘Oh god, other people are listening to my music, and it’s moving them’?
There are different things at different times. The tattoos are always wild, when someone really resonates with a song or a song title enough, and you’re like, “I can’t believe you got that tattoo. That’s awesome!” One of my fans happens to be a mother, and as I understand it, she has picked mulberries off her mulberry tree while listening to my music, so she was quite taken aback by the fact that I had a song titled ‘Mulberry Tree’ on the album. She sent me a couple messages about how like time is cyclical, it’s all cyclical, and she couldn’t believe that it had come back to her and hit her in this very personal way. So I thought that was really sweet, because it’s just a reminder that we’re all living our lives in relation to one another.
You have lived the hustle, and done the slog, and now you’re here to launch your debut album. What has been one of your favourite moments leading up to this moment? Was there a moment that made you just want to keep going?
The first time someone paid me for a gig. I was singing in a cafe, and I think I’d offered to do it for free. And someone came up to me, saying, “We have a wedding next month, and we actually think you should be there, and we’d love for you to sing.” They had not intended to have any live music at their wedding, but they said, “We just saw you perform, and we need to have you.” I was like, “Sure. Like, I’ll do it.” They asked how much. I said $200.
I remember getting so nervous. My father was driving me [to the wedding], and I knew this was so huge for me: “I’m going to get $200, can you believe it? I’m going to get paid for music.” So we play the show. And the man hands me an envelope and thanks me for doing the wedding. And I check and he’s given me $400. I said to him, “Oh my god, you made a mistake.” And I try to hand back the envelope, and he goes, “No, no, you keep it. You deserve it.” I cried so much! And my dad was like, “You’re going to get so much more. You’re going to be recognised in so many more ways.”
I can’t believe that that I still am doing this. That was fifteen years ago and I’m still getting to do music every day.
I imagine this career is such a tough road – it’s a great road, but you are suddenly not only navigating your career, but you are navigating a very public thing about your own personal thoughts. It must be very confusing: what ground do you hold on to, when do you allow others in?
Sometimes when I’m writing, I’m not thinking, “What would be relatable, what do people need to hear? What are other people going through?” I sort of just write from a place of: “Well, this is what I’m going through, and this is what I have to get off my chest”, and I trust that I really resonate with my work – which is the only instinct I have, because it’s worked for me thus far. So I’ve tried not to muddy it too much. If I relate to it, then I have to trust again, coming back to this not-so-special thing that someone else out there will relate to it too.
Not everyone can put pen to paper about how they’re feeling, but I can, and I think that’s my place in the world. That’s my responsibility.
Promised Land is out now. You can download and stream here.
