Just about all of our lyrics were submitted by fans of Samoan music, many of whom who were ‘natives of the Ville’, or members of our old One Samoana social network.
Why Samoan Lyrics?
While we have a true love for Samoan music, this collection is more about helping to preserve our language. So much beautiful poetry is stored in the lyrics of our songs, and music is a powerful tool for learning those words and passing them along to our children.
The next level, of course, would be for us to understand all the words…and metaphors and references…in our songs. As you may have noticed, not all our submitted lyrics are correctly transcribed. That shows you that so many of us love Samoan music a bit more than we can speak or write our language.
A Community Effort
This is where we rely on the support of other Samoan music fans. We ask for your help to correct the words and spellings of any of our posts that need it, and we welcome your thoughts on the meaning and origins of each song.
We also – always – want to give credit where it’s due. Because our Samoan music industry is still largely unregulated, the composers of so many of our ‘classic’ and ‘traditional’ songs are not generally known, and we’ve even seen several disputes about who actually wrote certain songs.
If at all possible, we would like to credit the correct composers with the songs they wrote. Please leave a comment on any lyrics post with whatever insight you can offer.
What’s Up with the YouTube Clips?
It just doesn’t seem right to read lyrics without listening to the actual songs, right? 🙂
We’re so grateful to all the YouTubers who’ve uploaded our favourite Samoan songs. We don’t actually upload any songs to YouTube ourselves, and as much as possible (which is not often) we try to find video links posted by the people who actually own the songs.
In case you’re a YouTuber worried about us using your video link, all the video views from our website are counted as your views and you keep all the ad clicks you get. It actually helps your stats for your videos to be shared and embedded outside of YouTube.
What’s Next?
We’re working on a couple projects that will help us extract even more Samoan language knowledge out of our collection of lyrics.
It’s been so much work so far! But we can’t wait to share what we’ve been up to.
If you want to stay informed, please sign up to get news and updates from our new network: Anava Samoana (form below).
Thank You
We’re happy you found us. Hope to see you in the comments or in your inbox.
x a Hamo Geek Girl