“The thing I admire most — and struggle with the most, when I’m trying to write my own songs — is wanting something to feel classic without sounding pastiche,” he added. “Somehow, more than most musicians I know, she is able to find that balance and make it her own.”
Indeed, an uncanny sense of time-travel pervades Bedouine’s music. (Her chosen moniker is an Anglicized version of an Arabic word for a nomadic tribe.) Her style of singing and composition conjure, quite vividly, the American folk revival of the 1960s and the early ’70s golden age of easy-listening pop, when the AM dial belonged to acts like the Carpenters and Carole King.
“Neon Summer Skin” finds Korkejian sifting through her memories and creating a highly personalized vision of her past. “I have a weird relationship to home, which is a lot of what this record is about,” she said at lunch, having just ordered a vegetarian spread that included grilled halloumi, baba ganouj and Rakakat bi Jebne, an appetizer she describes as being like “Lebanese mozzarella sticks.” (She insists that we save room for knafeh, a savory-sweet Middle Eastern dessert that she loves.)
As a writer, Korkejian is inspired by Leonard Cohen, particularly in terms of efficiency. “I think of it as nutrition — like how one lentil has the most protein or iron,” she said. “What word is packed with the most meaning?”
Throughout “Neon Summer Skin,” Korkejian emanates a kind of benevolent poise even as her songs consider heavy and even harrowing aspects of her family history. Korkejian wrote “Canopies,” a stirring acoustic ballad, from the perspective of her grandmother, who placed her 7-year-old daughter — Korkejian’s mother — in a Lebanese orphanage that had housed victims of the Armenian genocide, to protect her from an abusive family member. “Waves, waves, fold over, and send her scent to me,” Korkejian sings, imagining a mother yearning for her child across the Mediterranean.
