War is something Yusif has seen first hand, as are heartache
and love, all leading to an album that is real and from-the-heart, an album
Yusif had to live in and live with to create. The journey was long and
the tales were often painful. But, the end result is a collection of
songs that catapult from melodically-rich indie-folk storytelling to hook-laden
pop-rock energy, all with a distinctive, yet memorable base (think Cat Stevens
fronting Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, mixed in with a Seattle flare).
Born in Seattle and raised between Seattle and Kuwait, the
Kuwaiti-American singer-songwriter lived in Kuwait during The Gulf War.
At the age of four, he and his mother soon found themselves separated
from his father.
“I was a little kid living in Kuwait during the Gulf War and
had to be evacuated with my mom. Then twelve years later I was living in
America during the War on Terror. It has been pretty intense to be part
of both cultures, especially at a time when 9/11 and the Iraq War were
happening and there was such a divide between the cultures,” states Yusif.
The story begins with Yusif returning to Seattle after
living abroad for ten years in an attempt to rediscover his musical roots and
begin his career as a recording artist.
Yusif just didn’t adhere to the Kuwaiti ideals. More
than once his dad caught him in his room, fornicating with girls,
which lead to huge fights.
“It’s very, very taboo in Kuwaiti society to have premarital
sex,” he informs. “It would be my dad’s behind on the line if the girl’s
father found out. He would then want to attack my father - or something
like that. It's a big deal. It's a very different culture.
It's the girl's reputation and the girl's dad's reputation that gets
tarnished, their family name is damaged. It's a very loving and
family-oriented society, that actually values women in ways we don't in
America. Culturally, your extended family is everything in Arabic
culture. We value that a lot more there than we do here in the West.
People here stress individualism and life is more communal over there.”
The fights with his father furthered his unhappiness in
Kuwait. The isolation he was feeling was growing deeper and stronger; he
was outcast and bullied in high school because he was very different, with
one foot in both cultures. At this point he convinced his parents to let
him move back to Seattle and live with his grandparents.
Once back in Seattle, it didn’t go well, as Yusif found
himself more isolated, more depressed, and resorting to more drugs and alcohol
for comfort. Unable to get into high school due to red tape, he soon
found himself attending community college, with hardly a friend in the world.
It was there he discovered grunge, Nirvana and Soundgarden. Songs like
“Fell On Black Days” really spoke to him.
He would eventually earn his high school diploma from the
American School of Kuwait and was accepted into John Hopkins University.
Graduating from John Hopkins in 2008, he once again headed back to
Seattle.
Packing everything he could fit into his hand-me-down ’87
Honda Accord, he embarked on a solo cross-country trek from Baltimore, Maryland
to Seattle. Once there, he quickly began playing the local open mic
circuit, becoming a regular on the burgeoning folk-pop scene that spawned the
likes of The Head and The Heart and Hey Marseilles.
“I played every open mic in the city, from Trabant to Conor
Byrne, to Murphy’s Pub, Blue Moon, Hopvine, you name it,” remembers Yusif.
“Sometimes I did two or three in a night, very often I did five or six a
week. It was like my job, except I wasn’t getting paid. I remember
strumming my acoustic guitar so hard a couple times that I would lose half a
fingernail and there would be bloodstains on the inside of my Martin after
performances.”
He still has this Martin, and used it on acoustic parts in the
recording of the self-titled full-length.
Opening with “Third World Soldier,” a harrowing tale of a
mother losing her child in war, with images of battleships and a mother’s love,
desperation, and despair at the loss, what was originally written as a piano
ballad became a gritty, rough-around-the-edges, and completely raw pop-rock
song routed in folk fundamentals. Cutting through pretension, it delivers
a bleak, yet anthemic anti-war message with nary a wasted guitar or melody.
“I wrote this song based on the experiences I went through
living through the Gulf War. My mom and I were separated from my father
for over a year after Saddam invaded Kuwait and my dad got stuck there. I
was only four. We get to the states and the first thing my Grandma tells
me is that I have a thick Arabic accent!”
While the album has plenty of anti-war and “all you need is
love” solutions, the album isn’t without it’s heartbreak. Such is the
case with “Underdog,” a light pop-rock number about finding comfort and love
with someone only to find out you’re nothing more than a mere convenience to
them.
“The song is about somebody that thinks that they have
finally found a person to love who is a true friend, but finds out that that’s
not what’s happening, that reality is very different from your perception of it
sometimes.”
The lost and lonely love song “My Heart Is Yours Forever”
finds Yusif treading Tom Petty water with a rich, B3-laced Southern-influenced
pop-rock song, while “Reach Out” is the album’s heaviest, hardest hitting
track, as Yusif struggles to find himself and his voice in the
post-drug-induced world he’s just created.
“I was looking for the answer to getting out of my drug
habits and I found them by doing the album,” he says of the full-length, and the
lyrical content of “Reach Out.”
“Take Your Love (And Go)” is a hooky, mid-tempo rock song
loaded with hooks and melody, telling the tale of a man and woman in lust,
constantly breaking up, and finally moving away from each other for the better.
Ending with “Only Fools Know Better,” Yusif delves deep with
a soul-searching love song detailing heartbreak, loss, moving on, and trying to
find yourself, all delivered in a quirky ballad form - funked out, with it’s
heart on its sleeve.
Dubbed “masterfully underproduced” by co-producer Joe
Reineke (of Orbit Audio), the result of this ten-track debut is something that
is raw, pretty, hopeful, anthemic, and "has a little magic it
in." A lot of that magic comes from Yusif's unique storytelling and
stance on life via his lyrics, especially "Cosmic Symphony," a song
that sums up the album's underlying theme about spiritual growth and personal
development.
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