Bio
Talibah Safiya is a recording artist and writer focused on storytelling through music, and experience curation. Safiya’s last record, Black Magic, was released in collaboration with the University of Memphis’s School of Music Business where she served as Artist in Residence. This project, listed as one of NPR’s favorite albums of 2024, interprets and reframes the University’s hill country blues catalog housed by Highwater Records
Safiya is currently serving as Narrative and Storytelling Manager at The Big We. She is also rolling out her latest body of musical work, Eternal, an album exploring themes of radical self acceptance, joy as resistance and therapy through dance. Last spring, her songs “I Love You Me” and “Unlimited” were featured in Walmart X Raedio’s latest “Black and Unlimited” compilation project.
As a songwriter, she recently contributed to the soundtrack for shows on both MAX and STARZ and is excited to continue to express her love for music and culture through service and performance on local and worldwide stages.
BLACK MAGIC
Combining “bad luck” and “Black magic,” Safiya’s Memphis is a place of expansive, continuing possibility.
The voices of the elders offer guidance toward the light, and Memphis' most imaginative soul daughter turns to them, literally, on an album incorporating the voices and playing of her forebears via samples from the Highwater label archives. Safiya's own glinting voice reanimates the spirit, pain and passion of hill country blues.
“a whirlwind, a storm, a creatrix of worlds and herself”
Combining “bad luck” and “Black magic,” Safiya’s Memphis is a place of expansive, continuing possibility.
Charles Hughes Oxford American
Safiya can seamlessly inhabit these different sounds and styles because, regardless of genre, there’s one unifying element at the core of all her music: peace. To know Safiya’s music is to know peace. She exudes it in every note and every word. It’s not performative or sporadically sprinkled in. It’s genuine and unapologetic. You deeply feel whatever emotion or story she’s conveying with her songs and you, beautifully, understand yourself better after hearing them.
"At the festival, she was performing for a tent of people who didn't know who she was, and she was just zeroing in on people speaking directly to them. She was witty, she was bawdy, she was frank." - Jewly Hight
https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2018/09/18/648784458/the-best-of-americanafest-2018