Savannah Ré Opia EP Revisited

Nine Tracks, Read Like A Book

The EP runs nine tracks, as its published tracklist shows: “Highly Favoured,” “Where You Are,” “Nothing Into Something,” “Homies,” “Love Me Back,” “Sacred,” “Solid,” “Opia” and the bonus track “Best Is Yet To Come.” Four of them had arrived ahead of the project as singles, “Where You Are,” “Homies,” “Solid” and “Best Is Yet To Come,” the last named one of Apple Music’s 100 best songs of its year, and the five new songs completed an arc Ré described at release as a project a listener could read like a book, chapter one to the end, rather than a set of snapshots.

The FADER’s release day coverage framed the same arc as a dive into “love’s revealing depths and the hopes, dreams, and insecurities that come along with it,” executive produced by her mentor Boi-1da alongside YogiTheProducer. She was named Amazon Music’s Breakthrough Artist of the Month on release day itself, an early sign of how far a nine song debut built entirely on candour was about to travel.

A Title Borrowed From Obscure Sorrows

The title comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and Ré has explained the find herself: a word for the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. SOCAN’s Words and Music feature carried her framing of the project as a nine song tracing of “the complexities of desire, connection, and vulnerability,” years in the shaping because, in the feature’s words, she is intentional with what she wants to say, with some songs two or three years old and kept because they belonged in the story.

Her track by track explanations to Rated R&B are the project’s own liner notes. “Highly Favoured” is for her mother and her faith. “Where You Are” was written missing her spouse across a work separation, then took on a second meaning when it arrived during the pandemic. “Homies” names the situationship honestly and asks for more. “Solid,” broken down in our reading of that song, is a plea about loyalty. And the title track, she said, was the hardest to write because it is the most vulnerable song on the project.

The Awards Season It Set Off

The history the EP made is stated plainly in her 2021 release record: Ré became the first artist ever nominated for both the Contemporary R&B Recording of the Year Juno, for “Where You Are,” and the Traditional R&B/Soul Recording of the Year Juno, for “Solid,” in the same year, then, on June 6, 2021, became the first artist ever to receive the Traditional R&B/Soul award itself when “Solid” won it. The EP also earned a SOCAN Songwriting Prize nomination and two Prism Prize top 20 nominations, for the “Solid” and “Opia” videos.

That is a remarkable return on a debut whose entire strategy was exposure of a different kind: no persona, no distance, a singer who had written for others, including in camps that drew Babyface’s ear, deciding that her own first statement would be the unguarded version. Toronto R&B in that era was crowded with talent. Opia separated itself by making vulnerability not a mood but a structure, nine chapters of it, titled after the exact moment a person decides whether to look away.

Released on November 20, 2020, Opia remains the founding document of Savannah Ré: nine tracks executive produced by Boi-1da and YogiTheProducer, a borrowed word for being truly seen turned into a method, and the debut that made Canadian music history at the Junos the following spring.