Neon Summer Skin
Some days, while drafting long petitions at the office, I put on my headphones and let Spotify run on shuffle. Last week, by serendipity, I found Bedouine...
My dearest incurable humanist,
Some days, while drafting long petitions at the office, I put on my headphones and let Spotify run on shuffle. Last week, by serendipity, I found Bedouine and then, even more luckily, saw her live at Rough Trade, the small record shop tucked into Rockefeller Center. She played songs from her new album, Neon Summer Skin, which came out on June 5.
Bedouine is the stage name of Azniv Korkejian, a Syrian-American singer-songwriter whose music, like memory, moves slowly, circling back, returning to the same place in a different light. Neon Summer Skin is an album about displacement, family history, and the grief of places that can no longer be returned to. Her family’s story moves across Armenia, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. The record asks what it means to carry “home” inside you when home keeps shifting.
Korkejian sings about childhood, about parents, about the version of yourself that existed before you understood belonging was never a given, about starting over, about loneliness. Her music mirrors that emotional range, moving fluidly from folk to bossa nova to Arabic-rooted textures. Listening to her in that small room, surrounded by vinyl and strangers, I thought about the distance between the girl I was in Venezuela and the woman I am now in New York, where migration has shaped not only my life but the work I do every day.
Until next week!