Bedouine

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As a child, if you’re lucky, summer afternoons stretch out like a yawn, pool waves are as warm and engulfing as a blanket, the safety of your mother’s arms feels endless. On her new album, Neon Summer Skin, Bedouine, the project of Azniv Korkejian, explores this feeling of safety long before one can fully understand the concept. Written with vivid, honest and intimate imagery after visiting her family in Saudi Arabia, it tells the story of family and upbringing, and mourns the end of her childhood. There is a singular resonance and newfound heft in this music previously unheard in Bedouine’s discography. 

Bedouine is known for making gentle, lilting folk songs that build fingerpicked guitar melodies into tsunamis of emotion. Her masterful songwriting and timeless melodies have earned her praise from publications like Pitchfork, who said her music “boasts a surreal calm and lived in glow,” and Rolling Stone, who lauded her “humble folk-pop brilliance,” plus an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and tours with the likes of Fleet Foxes and Father John Misty. 

As personal as her songs have been, they’ve often built upon universal experiences. The writing on Neon Summer Skin, however, is full of specific memories: a neon swim suit, beads of water dripping down tangled hair, the blood of a lamb, often sacrificed at Syrian weddings, oozing across the pavement. “It was the first time I had the inclination to write a record about one main subject which gave me a clarity and motivation I hadn’t quite had before.” 

Bedouine started working on the record after a trip to Saudi Arabia to visit her parents. She correctly assumed it would be her last one there because her family was retiring to Armenia. “For my 20s and much of my 30s, I couldn’t sit still,” she says. “I would pack my car and move to a new place. I was so curious about my own independence that it just didn’t occur to me for the longest time to mourn the past. But after that trip, I came home and was so devastated. I couldn’t place the feeling immediately, but as I started writing, I realized I was processing that I wasn’t ready to stop being somebody’s kid. 

She co-produced most of the songs with her longtime collaborator, Gus Seyffert, and wrote with the sweet pop melodies of Todd Rundgren, Karen Carpenter, and Carole King in mind. She also worked on a couple of tracks with producer Jonathan Rado with Michael and Brian D’Addario of the Lemon Twigs.  “It was important to me to try to approach some of the production of this record a little differently, just to try something new,” she says. The result is a fuller, more playful sound, at times grand and orchestral, shimmery and surreal, inflected with bits of psychedelia, bossa nova, and jazz.