The title of Southern Avenue’s latest album, Be the Love You Want, debuting Friday, August 27th, on Renew Records/BMG, could hardly be more apt. Lately, the band embodies love on multiple levels, what with Tierinii and Ori Naftaly, the band’s singer and guitarist, respectively, celebrating their second year of marriage in October and a baby girl due in November.
But before any of that, there were other bonds between them. As Ori says, “I always loved Tierinii like a sister. It was so platonic from 2015 to 2018. Almost four years. But then we traveled the world together and experienced our lowest and highest moments together. I’ve never before had a girlfriend who was my best friend at first. So that’s a different experience. We got married in October of 2019 in Israel, with my family. So we’re a true family band. Her sister, my sister-in-law, is on the drums. And I have another sister-in-law, Ava, she’s 22, and she just joined us full-time as a background singer and percussionist.”
Putting a finer point on it, Ori emphasizes that Southern Avenue is a collective working unit. “It’s not a couple band, it’s a family band, so we’re not that mushy-mushy together when we’re working. It’s not about me and her; it’s about all of us.”
That “us,” according to Ori, is expressing itself more fully on the new album than ever before, thanks to the freedom afforded them by their label. “BMG heard the demos, and they were like, ‘Cool, make an album, here’s the money.’ ‘Who do you want to produce? Okay, cool. We love Steve Berlin.’ And I wanted to co-produce it, and they were like, ‘Cool.’ They didn’t hear anything up until the mastered tracks. We could have made a polka album!”
In having free rein and a sympatico producer with decades of know-how behind him, the band has crafted a statement of their diverse talents more compelling than any previous work, including their Grammy-nominated Keep On. “This is as us as we’ve ever been. We explored a lot of ideas that are in us musically, but we’d never had the opportunity to either write or record,” says Ori. “Some songs, like ‘Push Now’ and ‘Heathen Hearts,’ we wrote with Cody Dickinson less than a month after Keep On was released. There’s a special freedom right after releasing an album, knowing nobody’s going to ask you for another one for a while. A lot of the songs have these twists and chord progressions that are a bit more sophisticated, maybe jazzy, or maybe more of a fusion of blues/soul/gospel/R&B.”
For his part, Berlin simultaneously encouraged the band and pushed them out of their comfort zone. “I’m such a perfectionist, and he was more like, ‘Let’s make it dirty,’” Ori says. “I recorded a solo on ‘Push Now,’ and it was good. But Steve said, ‘No no, make it sound like crap. Make your guitar sound crazy. Turn all your pedals on!’ We were all respectful of the studio and always trying to be clean and tight, and he kind of broke that for us. He was like, ‘Make it sound like shit and record it!’ I learned a lot from him, like how to let go.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Berlin, a saxophonist, was not the main motivator for the dazzling horn parts all over the album. “Our first album was very primal,” Ori notes. “But with Keep On and this one, the horns were our decision. We’ve only ever used Marc Franklin and Art Edmaiston. Art arranges half, Marc arranges half, and they decide which ones. It helps freshen things up.
“Sometimes Steve didn’t think a song needed horns, but I insisted. We will always have horns on our albums, and hopefully always Marc and Art. They’re part of the band, even though they’re not touring with us. It’s not just having horns; it’s having them specifically because of the style and the feel they bring. It elevates the songs to a different place and grounds it in the Memphis mud. The melting pot. It’s like I turn up the heat of the melting pot by 200 degrees once I have these guys on it.”