‘You have escaped being killed. But there is a long tail of sadness’: a Bedouine singer on the strangeness of Arab life outside the Middle East | Pop and rock

Tsang a song on Azniv Korkejian’s fourth album as Bedouine, Neon Summer Skin, recreating a good day from childhood. “Taken to the pool, where my only concern is to be taken off at sunset,” he says, calling from Los Angeles. After that, mom and dad wash me in the bathroom and put me to bed.” Featuring soft 70’s music, this song is more than just a workout. He said: “I wanted to explain what it feels like to be safe.” “Most of the stories are about not having the opportunity to not think about your safety. I think about the children of Palestine and Lebanon, who are not given freedom.”

The conflict that has ravaged the Middle East is the subject of Neon Summer Skin, but the album’s themes of migration, identity and insecurity – wrapped in the soft sound of 1970s-style MOR pop – are also very personal. Korkejian’s family is Armenian, but he and his parents were born in Syria, while his siblings were born in Syria. Saudi Arabiawhere Mr. Korkejian lived, “at a US location that was like a gateway group”, until 1995. That year, undaunted by the impending Gulf War, the family successfully applied for a green card lottery and immigrated to the US. “And thank God, because we would have had to go back to Syria,” says Korkejian. “I don’t know what would have happened to us at that time.”

10-year-old Korkejian was not happy about escaping the Syrian civil war, however. “I was angry about the move for a few years,” he recalls. His first Halloween in Massachusetts emphasized the strange nature, “the idea that I can go on forever, instead of being limited by our villages”.

In the end, the US became home. At the age of 18, he went to university in Los Angeles, where he studied voice control. Along the way, he picked up the guitar, taught himself fingering, wrote music for films made by his classmates and professors, and dreamed of becoming a singer and songwriter. But for many years, writing music “was a way of expressing yourself, like writing a magazine”, he says. Maybe that’s why, when he started releasing albums a decade ago, his early records seemed intimate and scheming, as if you could count on an intelligent wallflower now quietly unleashing his discoveries.

Neon Summer’s skin is different, inspired by its parents’ second origin in Saudi Arabia. They returned after their children left home, but “you can’t get citizenship in Saudi Arabia if you’re not a Arab, so even though he worked there for decades, when he retired, he moved to Armenia”, Korkejian says. “Syria was no longer safe because of the war.”

He started writing these songs after his last trip to Saudi Arabia in 2019. “I used to visit my parents often when I was hanging out, always going back to my childhood, enjoying every minute. Now I had this feeling that I would never go back.” He pauses. “Destruction, death and killing in the area… our family is going through a very good situation. We are all healthy, there is food on the table. But we are divided, and visiting is difficult, and sometimes impossible. I missed the death of my grandmother, my aunt, who was in Syria during the war. You can escape the killing for a long time, but you can escape the killing for a long time. people and places that are very important to you.”

He wrote the ruins of On My Own, the “thesis” of the album’s titles, back in LA, on piano rather than guitar. He said: “I leaned on a difficult word I had just learned, ‘middle of the road.’ “Carole King. Elton John. Todd Rundgren. I wanted to sing with the most emotional voice, the movement of the music, the most shaking” – a goal supported by guests Lemon Twigs and Jonathan Rado of Foxygen.

Despite the departure from his previous records, Neon Summer Skin is Korkejian’s masterpiece. At its heart is Canopies, another tale of displacement and loss, describing how his mother was placed in an orphanage for Armenian daughters by Korkejian’s grandfather, to protect her from her abusive husband. His opening line – “I loved you too much to keep you, so I did it” – captures the destruction with grace. “My mother talks about her mother making this sacrifice, to protect her,” Korkejian says. It happened out of love, but trying to understand that as a child was difficult for him.

Pain is the way to connect these songs, as well as love. To help promote the song, Korkejian plans to display old photos of his parents, from when they lived in Syria and Lebanon. It’s an admittedly “philanthropic” project, but there’s also interest. “People in the Middle East often see them as violent and dangerous, but also kind,” he says. “I want to humanize them.” I think it’s like when an algorithm comes up with things like, ‘did you know Iranians used to wear bikinis?’ And in these photos from the 70s, my parents can be seen amazing. She was very hip and beautiful. “