Samoa Lyrics started as a subsite of One Samoana, which is all about discovering our Samoan cultural heritage.
We realized early on that our music – and more so, the poetry in our lyrics – is a huge expression of our values, our sentiments and our philosophies as a people. Basically, you can learn a lot about who Samoans are by listening to our music.
We’ve been musicians since the ancient days, of course, but from the 1960s or so, Samoan pop and rock bands started rising to popularity, especially amongst migrants to New Zealand and the United States.
Their electric guitars, drum kits, amps and even a few (a lot) of their songs’ melodies may have been borrowed from the Western world, but their island-touched sound, the poetic eloquence in their words, the ‘feels’ they projected through their music – especially in their many many love songs…those are all distinctly Samoan
Some of the songs produced in that scene remain as popular today as they were back then, mostly because they keep getting re-recorded by more contemporary Samoan artists. But if you’ve never heard their originals, you owe it to yourself to check them out.
To help kickstart your collection of classic (i.e. from the 60s, 70s and 80s) Samoan love songs, here are a few of our absolute favourites:
