On going back for what is mine

I stopped making music for a long time. Not all at once, and not on purpose — the way you stop calling someone, the way a project drifts to the bottom of a stack of other projects, the way a year of not making something becomes two years and then five. Eventually you don't say "I'm a musician taking a break." You don't say anything at all.

Sankofa is an Akan word and an Adinkra symbol. The literal translation is closer to "go back and get it" than to "return." It is usually drawn as a bird with its head turned backward, holding an egg in its beak — looking at where it has been while still moving forward. The wisdom of learning from the past to build the future. Most of what gets written about Sankofa frames it as ancestral reverence, which it is, but I think it is also something more practical.

I think it is permission to come back.

When I started making music again, I needed a name that would remind me of what I had to do every time I sat down to work. Sam Kofa is my given name plus a piece of a word that means go back and get it. Every release under this name is, on some level, a small Sankofa — a return to a song that has been waiting, an idea that I'd shelved, a verse I wrote in 2014 and finally finished in 2024.

The album that came out of that period is called About Time. The title is doing two jobs at once. About time as in "finally" — the relief of releasing something that had been overdue for almost a decade. And about time as in: a record about the passage of it.

My biggest fear used to be that these songs would go unfinished. Then one day my biggest fear became that they would remain unreleased. That fear can now go to rest.

-Liner notes, About Time

This is, I now understand, also what hospitality has been teaching me for fifteen years. You can't fake taste. You can only build it slowly, in restaurants and clubs and at other people's tables, by paying attention to what works and what doesn't, by serving thousands of meals or DJing thousands of hours, by learning what a room needs before the room knows it needs it. None of that shows up on a résumé. All of it shows up in the work.

So this is what KOFA FM is, more than anything else: a place to publish what gets made when you finally come back to the work. The music. The mixes. The writing. The friends and family who made all of it possible. A frequency you can tune into.

Indie since always. Returning forever.