Yasmine Hamdan thought a year away from music would be enough. But, somehow, one year became eight. Next month, the Beirut-born singer returns with I Remember I Forget, her first solo album since 2017, which reflects on a homeland that has shifted dramatically since her last release.
“I stopped touring after my previous record, Al Jamilat,” she tells The National as the inaugural guest of the weekly podcast Tarab. “I decided back then to take a year off to do the things I never have the time to do and to connect with the people I love. But then Covid came, then the economic crisis in Lebanon, then the Beirut Port explosion. All these things I had to process. It took me time to gather my thoughts and to understand what I wanted to come up with.”
Rather than rushing back into the cycle of releases and tours, Hamdan took time to develop material at her own pace.
“I was going against the general tendency of productivity and communication, of being full-on all the time,” she says. “For me, the world was very noisy. I needed clarity.”
Working from her Paris home studio, Hamdan says most of the songs were completed there before she brought in collaborators to flesh out the ideas.
“I had no plan whatsoever, aside from the pleasure of creating,” she says. “It gave me strength. But when the work started to evolve, I began to feel this could become a record. When I had four songs, that really made me happy; I started to see the whole picture.”
The songs became an exploration of living in liminality – between present safety and distant trauma – drawing from sources as varied as 11th-century muwashah poetry and encrypted Palestinian resistance songs.
Hon was the first song she wrote for the album, co-written with Palestinian poet Anas Alaili, and it captured that tension between the here and the there.
“I had a blockage. For the first time in my life, I was going through an accumulation of crises. Making music is intuitive for me. But when it came to writing lyrics, articulating what I was feeling with words, that was tough. I wanted to pick the right words and the right tonality that makes me feel tuned with who I am and what I'm going through,” she says.
“I always like to mix influences that inspire me – Arabic instruments, but also Pakistani music, Japanese music, really old recordings,” she adds. “I don't care for borders, whether it's Arabic or rock or anything else.”
Shmaali, which merges subdued electronic production with chant-like verses and a hazy melody, is built around encrypted Palestinian songs dating back to the Ottoman era. These coded verses allowed women to communicate with imprisoned loved ones while evading jailers and censors.
“I was completely in awe when I discovered this form,” Hamdan says. “The idea of resisting with poetry, of using coded lyrics to exclude the authority that is oppressing you, was a powerful symbol. I wanted my version to be a victorious song, almost like a hymn.”
She brought her sister in for backing vocals, working with frequent French collaborator Marc Collin and his newly acquired 1960s synthesiser. “He had never worked with it before, so we said: 'OK, let's try it,'” she recalls. “That experiment became part of the track.”
The freewheeling spirit of I Remember I Forget reflects Hamdan's own life, split between Paris and Beirut.
“This record is about exactly this – the sense of living in two places at the same time,” she says. “Sometimes I feel it's absurd because I'm living here, but also living the time of war that is there. I don't think you can ever disconnect, because all the people I love are there.”
Born in Lebanon and raised across Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and Greece, Hamdan was 13 when Iraq's invasion of Kuwait forced her family to return to Beirut.
“I lived this experience of exodus and it marked me deeply,” she says. “I felt I was living a historical moment. When we came back to Lebanon, I didn't think of it as 'returning to my country'. I came back to a place where my parents came from, where I had a lot of family and where I had emotional ties.”
She formed Soap Kills, the pioneering electronic duo with producer and multi-instrumentalist Zeid Hamdan, which helped shape Beirut's postwar music scene in 1997, when she was 22.
“It was a very particular period because everything was possible,” she says of forming the band. “The war had ended and there was some hope that, after all this destruction, things would be corrected. But we were also a generation that inherited the war without understanding it, and the traces of it were everywhere.”
She describes her work with Soap Kills – known for seminal tracks such as Za and Cheftak – as a soundtrack to her sense of alienation in Beirut. Coming to Lebanon after years abroad, she recalled feeling like an “insider outsider”.
“I never really felt I belonged to any place. I didn't know where home was,” she notes. “So for me, music became this place where I would find myself, where I would reconnect to the past of this region, of my family. We had such a scattered childhood and history.”
As for the abrasive and pugnacious music – with Hamdan's raw and hypnotic vocals addressing themes of love, loss and urban dislocation – she says Soap Kills' approach was nothing if not resolute.
“I knew what I was doing and I knew that I had to do it,” she says. “This was a way of transforming pain and also rebelling. I was not going to pursue any conventional way of existing. I wanted to find my own path, even if it wasn't easy.”
Her relationship with her own former firebrand image has evolved considerably since those early days. “When I started, I felt that showing my image was violating something,” she says. “Now I want to use images for fun, to experiment with them as I do with music. It's enriched my world so much.”
The band ended in 2005 when she moved to Paris, and Hamdan, 49, says she has no interest in reviving it. “Every record for me is a new adventure,” she says. “Now the world has changed. We have changed. Even the interaction with music has changed.”
After Soap Kills, Hamdan began to define her solo identity. In 2009, she released Arabology, a sleek electro pop album created with Madonna producer Mirwais. The project marked Hamdan's first major step away from the band and her earliest attempt at confronting her resistance to showing her image.
“I had a mission between me and myself to break this resistance,” she recalls. “After that I was more present physically because I thought that if I am singing in Arabic, maybe it's important to put a face to the voice so it can connect to more people.”
I Remember I Forget continues this trajectory through her push towards multidisciplinarity. “Now I don't feel the same way at all,” she says. “I want to use images for fun, to experiment with them as I do with music. I've been writing and directing clips, and also engaging with filmmakers, animators and other artists. This has enriched my world so much. This is how I want to evolve – towards something more multidisciplinary.”
Living between France and Lebanon has shaped not just her music but her entire worldview.
“Paris is great, but I don't have the emotional engagement that I have with Lebanon,” she says. “Lebanon, the region, Palestine – this is what nourishes my reflections. It's a window through which I see the world. But I'm far, I'm not there. I'm not living what they are living. I'm living something else. And it's not something that you can disconnect from.”
Yasmine Hamdan performs as part of Tamas Festival at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Centre on January 29. Doors open at 6.30pm and tickets start from Dh52
