Exile, freedom and yearning in the songs of Souad Massi

“Draw me a home with big windows,” implores a pure, intimate voice, “so the light can enter my heart. Draw me a bird, a free bird that no one may possess.” Acoustic guitar, filled with the yearning of Berber mountain music, picks out a delicate melody. “Draw me a sea, but not too deep, for many have ventured and drowned” — a surge of strings — “have risked their lives and left their wounds pouring out streams of their mothers’ warm tears.”

Algerian-born singer-songwriter Souad Massi has spent decades thinking about the world and the position of the vulnerable within it. Her new album Sequana is no exception. On the opening track “Dessin-Moi Un Pays”, she asks the listener not only to imagine but to join her in sketching out a country that could work for everyone, a country with “no corrupt rulers and no evil wars”. The utopianism is tempered with realism: “Draw me a land that no artist has drawn.” 

Reflecting on the song now, in a conversation over Zoom that slips between English and fast-paced, impassioned French, she remembers being prompted by the fall of Kabul to think about the need for a place “where we can share the beauty of life, where we can express ourselves. We have to fight to keep this dream, to be un citoyen activiste.”

Massi knows the perils of activism. Born and raised in Algeria, she had to leave the country more than 20 years ago when her outspokenness and her singing with heavy-metal band Atakor attracted death threats. She has lived in Paris ever since.

“I’m not a political person”, she says, rather disingenuously (when we first spoke in 2003, we spent as much time talking about the Iraq war as we did about music). “But like Dylan, like Víctor Jara, like Joan Baez, we have to use our arms to wake up our people. Singing gives me a [sixth] sense for my life. It’s like an arm. I can defend myself with my music and with my lyrics. It’s my space.”

For Sequana, she enlisted Justin Adams as producer. “I had heard what he did with Tinariwen, Rachid Taha and Robert Plant. He’s a big musician. And a very nice guy. I needed him for my album to be like a big brother who has more experience than me musically. He helped me to be free and confident.”

Adams, for his part, was happy to play that role. “Paris is full of superb players”, he says — an old punk’s ambivalence about the word “superb” clear from the tone of his voice. “Souad had a very clear idea of what the album should be, and I tried to preserve her own personality and who she is and how she speaks. Sometimes my job was just to sit back and say: ‘Souad wants it like this’.” He expresses respect for her as “the progressive face of Algerian culture”, and an acknowledged role model for younger women musicians from north Africa.

I’m still fighting because I have no choice and I am not afraid of what I see in this world’

That progressive outlook is clear on one of the highlights of the album and its only cover, an Arabic translation of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt”. Massi and Adams bonded over a love of country music, with the banjo also prominent in north African chaabi, and a shared emphasis on storytelling. She discovered “Hurt” in Johnny Cash’s version by accident while on a listening excursion into her touchstones Dylan and Cohen.

“When I listened the first time to this song with the voice of Johnny Cash, it really touched me,” she says. “The lyrics are beautiful and really deep. I asked myself: am I strong enough to sing a song like that as an Arabic woman? It’s not easy to make ourselves [metaphorically] nude, to say I’m going to hurt myself. I wanted to say this but hadn’t the courage or inspiration to say it.”

The Arabic words came easily to her, she says, “because I understand the song. I went to my studio, took the pen and just wrote so naturally.” The recorded version starts quiet and builds amid an ominous rumble of frame drums, like a Sufi ceremony.

Another singer-songwriter referenced here is Víctor Jara, murdered half a century ago by the Chilean military, who first smashed the fingers with which he had played the guitar, and then riddled him with bullets. “I wanted to pay tribute to Víctor because of his fight for freedom. I wanted to give him a little homage because he was a real artist and gave his life for us, for freedom, for integrity.”

The narrative stretches wider into a tribute to “all artists, everyone who has a voice — all the intellectuals, all journalists, saying I have confidence in them” and a demand “to refuse all totalitarian regimes, like in Chile [under Pinochet], the Maghreb, the Middle East, Africa.”

Adams’s influence on the sound of the record is clearest on “Twam”, which Massi had previously recorded for a film soundtrack. The producer admits to being “unconvinced” by French rock in general, and in particular by that incarnation of it, and urged Massi to make it “more basic”, adding a combination of fuzzy punk guitar with hefty doses of quarter-toned maqam (modal improvisation) — a rocky rush of energy that awakened her “old memories of being young in Algeria”.

But for the most part, voice and acoustic guitar dominate the foreground of the record, with breathy flute from Syrian musician Naïssam Jalal, who was originally booked for one track but then made himself indispensable. There are novel South American touches of bossa nova and calypso as well on the optimistic “L’Espoir” and the vengeful “Ciao Bello”, their rhythms driven by cajón and shakers. “I do miss you a little — to say a lot would be lying”, she proclaims jauntily on the latter. “The good thing is at the end of the day/I can choose how to spend my evening with no arguments.”

Sequana is named after the Gallo-Roman deity of water and water springs, in particular the Seine: it is an expression of concern and support for children facing the modern world. “As a mother, I am touched by the bad feelings of teenagers — my daughters [17 and 12] and their friends — especially with Covid. They feel lost and not understood. I tried with Sequana to give them good vibrations and energy to see the beauty of life.”

The album’s cover shows Massi with two long-stemmed daisies covering both of her eyes, a message in floral form. “This flower has a sense of resurrection. I’m still fighting because I have no choice and I am not afraid of what I see in this world. I put this flower because beauty — art and music — gives me a lot of courage. And a lot of hope to continue fighting. I will die and then come back to life one more time.” She laughs. “Like a cat.”

‘Sequana’ is released by Wrasse Records on October 14
Souad Massi plays the Barbican Hall, London on October 29

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