BEIRUT: The stage can be a liberating place. Some musicians slip into a completely different persona when performing. For others, the microphone serves to amplify their voices, bestowing them with clarity and strength in a merciless industry that often offers diminishing returns in exchange for genuine creativity and artistic courage.
Nadine Khouri, the enigmatic, Lebanon-born singer-songwriter whose spellbinding, penumbral vocal delivery has adorned a collection of captivating releases over almost two decades, certainly belongs to the latter variety.
Her velvety voice seized the attention of English producer John Parish, best known for his work with iconic artists including PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Eels and Sparklehorse. Last month, Khouri followed up her 2017 collaboration with Parish — the critically acclaimed LP “The Salted Air” — with “Another Life,” a nine-track anthology of mesmerizing material that challenges everything she has done to date but stays true to her immense talent as a songwriter.
“It’s a much less confessional album than ‘The Salted Air,’” the soft-spoken singer and guitarist tells Arab News. “That one was quite romantic, while ‘Another Life’ is more of a haunted album.”
Laden with intriguing intimacy and spectral mystique in equal measure, the LP — originally meant to be recorded in the spring of 2020 — alludes to themes of exile and loneliness and addresses the way Khouri spent her time during the COVID-19 pandemic with elegance and grace.
“During the lockdowns, I couldn’t write at all. I found myself really struggling. I was stuck inside alone, and a lot of the time I was getting a lot of flashbacks, reliving old memories,” she recalls, while stressing that the experience was also constructive. “It put a lot of things I was thinking about into perspective. Many images from the past appeared that I was perhaps suppressing.”
Her inclination to engage in introspection and dip deep was rooted in another major life event that she undertook at the same time. After living in London for the best part of the last 20 years, she had finally decided to leave post-Brexit Britain behind for greener pastures across the English Channel.
“When I was moving from the UK to Marseille, I thought a lot about the lives I’ve lived, and what I was leaving behind,” she says. “And with the tragedy of the (August 4, 2020) Beirut explosion, there was a lot I was asking myself at that point. Many of those questions found their way into the music.”
As with “The Salted Air,” Parish helped the singer channel a lot of those questions and sentiments in the studio. “Aside from being incredibly talented and capable of elevating anyone’s work, I trust him,” Khouri says. “I really appreciate him as a person and working together has felt natural and comfortable on a human level.
“I knew that John would be able to capture what I was going for on this album. I was looking for harmony and a process that’s as easy as possible.”
“The Salted Air” deservingly propelled her into wider public view, including a support tour with the American slowcore pioneers, Low. Her latest studio effort, meanwhile, is speckled with intimations of Khouri’s early work, though she readily admits that this was not necessarily a conscious decision.
“I wasn’t trying to revisit my older music, but rather my old self,” she says. “My life as it was, the things that I remember, everything that’s imprinted upon me so strongly. I didn’t want to lose that and was trying to really be with and explore that person that I felt was maybe lost or left behind.”
The dreamy “Keep On Pushing These Walls” and sax-infused, bass-driven “Vertigo” are perfect examples of Khouri’s desire “to end up with something that has more presence, and a proper rhythm section” on “Another Life.”
She will spend the foreseeable future promoting the new record and is “excited” at the prospect of performing with a trio on the French leg of her upcoming tour next year.
“I feel really connected to the people that come to my shows. It blows my mind. You never know who’s going to get your music and it could be anyone, all the way from Yorkshire to Berlin,” she says. “I find that really awesome.”
