Stompa

Album: Harmony (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • The Canadian singer Serena Ryder rocks out on this track, where she implores us to "clappa your hands" and "stompa your feet." It was the first single from her fifth studio album, Harmony, and it got her in heavy rotation on Canadian Rock radio for the first time.

    The song is driven by a riff she came up with on acoustic guitar, which she then worked on with her producer, Jerrod Bettis. "That was the first idea that we started for the record," Serena told us. "I don't know what effects he used, because I'm not a gearhead or anything. Basically, I know how to record with one microphone, so that's how I wrote. But now I use a Gibson Flying V through my Orange amp. And that's super fun."
  • Talking about her inspiration for the guitar riff in our 2013 interview, Ryder said: "I'm a huge fan of T Rex. A lot of people say Black Keys, but T Rex are the originators of that kind of vibe and that kind of sound. That's more of the vibe I was thinking when I was writing the riff."
  • The Harmony album is based on the concepts of earth, water and fire, with each song designated one of those elements. "Stompa" is earth.

    Ryder said she had the idea about four years before she wrote the album, and it was only when she started composing the songs that she realized she was subconsciously writing with that theme.
  • This was used in the Season 9 episode of the TV show Grey's Anatomy, "The End is the Beginning is the End."
  • After spending three years touring her sophomore album Is It O.K., an exhausted and depressed Serena Ryder felt she needed to get away from music, so she returned to Canada and spent weeks in bed. This song is about Ryder's attempt to overcome her depression by recalling what music meant to her when she started playing guitar at the age of 13. "It's the best medicine in the world," she told Billboard magazine, "and I wrote the song to remind myself that."
  • The song was Ryder's first platinum selling single in Canada peaking at #8 on her home country's singles chart.
  • This featured in a Cadillac SRX TV advert, which debuted the week of April 22, 2013.

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