It's been almost 20 years since veteran singer-songwriter Simphiwe Dana burst onto the scene with her stunning debut album, "Zandisile".
"Zandisile" earned her the South African Music Award (SAMA) for Best Newcomer and Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2004, and solidified her as a national star virtually overnight.
In the years since, she's put together an impressive and singular body of work that includes nine albums and countless singles.
This Saturday and Sunday, Dana will be exploring this vast musical repertoire, which consists of many songs she has not performed in a long time, in the concert “Isipaji sika Simphiwe Dana" at the State Theatre in Pretoria.
I managed to catch up with her at Bryanston's cosy Ukko restaurant on Thursday afternoon during a press junket to chat about the show. "Isipaji means your handbag as a lady," she explained about her upcoming show.
"And it speaks to my creative bag, my repertoire. And I'm foraging through that repertoire and finding those songs that I always felt were too challenging to do live and challenging myself to do them."
She cited the example of a song she performed earlier this year that she's never performed before from "Zandisile" called Chula Ukunyathela.
Previously she'd refrained from performing the song because she found it too challenging, especially considering that she has a wide selection of other easier songs to choose from.
"Now I'm like why not actually? Let's do that. This song has been asked for for years and I've never done it. So I did it on Moya and that's when I got the idea that let's challenge ourselves and bring out all of these other songs.
"I have a lot of these kind of ideas and they will keep coming and because I have them, the opportunities to stage them will also keep coming. That's how energy works."
Figuring her place in the industry following all the disarray that's befallen the entertainment space due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has not been easy for Dana.
"I felt literally like a fish out of water," she said. "With the way that everything has changed and how desperate things have become, how few opportunities there are, how few people are willing to invest in reviving the industry and government not really playing ball in understanding their role, it's taking a lot of creativity and some kind of thinking out the box."
It also required independence, she said. "If you're someone who's used to depending on others to get your stuff together to get going, if you can't create ideas and make them work, you're going to struggle for a while because the industry requires you to literally become your own boss and create the position that you want.
“Be a part of reviving the industry instead of waiting for the industry to come to you and say, 'Okay, we're back now, ” she said