Bedouine – Neon Summer Skin
Bedouine, the project of Azniv Korkejian, announces her new album, Neon Summer Skin, out June 5th via Thirty Tigers, and releases the lead single/video, “Long Way to Fall.”
Written with vivid, honest and intimate imagery after visiting her family in Saudi Arabia, Neon Summer Skin tells the story of family and upbringing. Throughout, Azniv mourns the end of her childhood and reflects on feeling a sense of safety long before one can fully understand its meaning. An album of hope as much as loss, it’s about searching for home and building it within yourself.
“For my 20s and much of my 30s, I couldn’t sit still,” Bedouine reflects. “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 to Saudi Arabia, 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 also began to recognize the lingering pain displacement can cause. “I felt so frustrated about the places that I’m from becoming war torn or difficult to return to,” she says. “My family has been split apart time and time again, immigrating between Armenia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. I wanted to document and honor my family’s stories.” Neon Summer Skin explores this evolution and eventual separation of family, whether due to political tumult or personal ambitions, as an attempt to accept that with each generation, life is a lesson in letting go.
Today’s single, “Long Way to Fall,” finds Bedouine in conversation with a family member struggling with addiction. In the song’s closing lines she sings: “And no, it’s not too late // For you, you don’t have it straight // Look at me, I’m on my way now // I’m on my way now.” Reflecting on the track, she says, “I was feeling lonely for their company. I wanted so badly for us to show up for each other like we had when we were younger and things were more simple.”
“Long Way to Fall” arrives alongside a video directed by Jackie Bao about the grief that comes with growing up. Bedouine comments, “For me it represents the difference between a close sibling-like relationship at a very young age versus one as adults. It’s no longer as simple as roughhousing one minute and playing the next. It’s more delicate. You have to respect each other’s space even when you’d rather shake someone awake.”
Bedouine co-produced most of Neon Summer Skin 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 and Michael and Brian D’Addario of the Lemon Twigs. She intentionally returned to the instruments she played as a child. “My first instrument was piano that I begrudgingly practiced daily due to my mom’s militant approach,” she jokes. “My second instrument was trumpet, which I started in elementary school. For the album, I used a handful of valved brass instruments that I could translate my knowledge of trumpet onto (valved trombone, tuba).” The record also features whipping flute solos, swooping string arrangements, and organ. 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.
Bedouine will play album release shows in Los Angeles at Largo at the Coronet on June 6th and at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on June 11th.
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