One of the biggest sporting events in the world, the 2022 FIFA World Cup is just around the corner. Thousands of Goans will be flocking to Qatar to be a part of the roaring crowds at the stadiums. With the enthusiasm for the game building up, music lovers in Goa were recently treated with a new video, ‘We Are Champions’ to add the vibe of football. Co-produced by Neha Rodrigues and Myron Landez, from Vasco, the upbeat song is sung by Zia Rodrigues and is uploaded on the YouTube channel, Fresh Anthems.
“Sports is something that unites nations. As Goans, we’ve all grown up with love we share of football. With Myron coming from an athletic background, we thought what better opportunity to kick start the upcoming FIFA tournament with a Goan football anthem,” says Neha Rodrigues, who runs Knead Bread, her own bakery in Vasco.
This is the debut song that Neha and Myron have worked on and they are quite excited with the response. “We have had a lot of appreciation coming our way. Being completely new in the field with very little knowledge of our own, we had to go through endless discussions, bloating out ideas, finding people who would be able to put our ideas out on the screen and search for locations. It was a long process that started off as just a rough sketch and has today been out on the video sharing platform for everyone to watch. It took us about six months to make this a reality,” adds Neha, a BBA graduate from Don Bosco College, Panjim.
Skeletron has produced the music for the song while Leon Pereira has directed the video. Stefney Dias has choreographed the song and Zia Rodrigues has sung as well as featured in the song.
Daughter of Aurvile Rodrigues, who has been part of bands like Sky High and Bad Blood and now has his own duo, As It Is, and Trisca Fernandes, who is part of the duo, D & T, Zia started singing in the studio at the age of 2. Currently, a student of Class 12 Arts at Loyola Higher Secondary School, she sings different genres of music such as pop, rock, semi classical, jazz etc and different languages like English, Hindi, Konkani and Spanish.
“My mother enrolled me in violin classes in which I completed just grade 1. I switched on to keyboards, ukulele and guitar and now I learn from YouTube whenever I get the time. I was enrolled for Indian classical vocal classes when I was in Class 8. I have won several prizes for singing in solo as well as group competitions. I also sing and play in the church choir. I have recently started training my vocal chords again with the help of a classical trainer. I have quite a few videos uploaded on my music channel. One of the viral videos was a Mando, ‘Cheddum – Khori Grestkai’ describing how important a girl child is,” says Zia, who also has an original Christmas song on her channel besides cover songs.
Speaking about singing and being part of the video, ‘We Are Champions’, Zia says, “It was an exciting and a very new experience for me as I had to learn choreography of the dance steps which was fun. We had three locations for the shoot. I had to wake up by 5 am to get my makeup done by my mother followed by the shoot at the beach and then to two other locations. The video was shot in a day. It was a great opportunity for me and I had fun singing and getting featured in the song.”
There are several football anthems that are released all over the world and Goans now have their own flavour to add to it, “Every FIFA anthem out there over the years has a magic of its own and we’ve tried to get a little of that magic in ours as well,” concludes Neha.
