One of the joys of my travels is the extraordinary people I meet. Spoken word poet Maryam Ghouth who lives in Dubai is one of them. She creates emotional, philosophical pieces fused with images and music that depict different facets of human experience “creating a meditative place for people to journey inward to connect to their truth.”
I felt an instant artistic connection as this approach reflects the direction of my own music.
I knew I would love to collaborate with her. In no time we were working together on a piece that I’m delighted to announce we have just released. I Had Hope, a poetic musical video, tells the story of a woman’s shift from expecting an apology from someone who had hurt her to the growing realization that waiting for it will only stifle her.
The piano music I composed is gentle and thoughtful, softly embracing her spoken emotions delivered in Arabic with English subtitles.
Amid images of cleansing, nurturing water, she moves from wishing and hoping for an apology that may never come to recognition that such a fantasy is folly, that she must place the hope for what she desires not in another but in herself.
She realizes that it is not an apology that will help her heal nor will it confirm what happened. Waiting for it will only prolong the past. She then resolves to not let the past determine her future.
Symbolically, in the last scene, she draws her foot horizontally through the sand as if to say “This is closure. The end of a chapter.”
I think we have all experienced this kind of wishful thinking at some level – the hope that others will fulfill expectations we set for them even when the other person is unaware of those expectations. The musical and spoken visual story Maryam and I created to explore this idea is quietly meditative in style. We hope that it captures the feelings you may have experienced around the need to recognize false hopes and that it cultivates the desire to create your own truth in a way that connects with you.
I’m excited to begin working on an English album with Maryam in the near future. Stay tuned.
