Image via Rhianna Hajduch
Ross Olson is still waiting on that Folk Implosion “natural One” mixed with “Stupid Girl” by Garbage mash-up.
When I met Dua Saleh before their show at the storied Roxy Theater in late January, the Hughes Fire burned 30 miles north and already claimed over 10,000 acres of land. By this point we were just two weeks into the cataclysmic firestorm that decimated the Los Angeles coastline and the northeast foothills. The cumulative physical and psychological impact remains immeasurable. Family homes, irreplaceable possessions, and years of history all reduced to ash.
Climate destruction hits close to home for Saleh, who, as a teenager growing up in Minneapolis, organized community efforts centered on environmental justice.This context adds weight to the apocalyptic I Should Call Them, Saleh’s debut LP from last October. The album follows two estranged lovers who race to rekindle their romance and make amends before the Doomsday clock expires. Across 11 tracks, Saleh uses toxic behavior in relationships to comment on collective negligence toward the Earth.
Over a soundscape of futuristic R&B, celestial funk, and anthemic pop, Saleh offers a masterclass in vocal elasticity. On “pussy suicide,” Saleh alternates vocal inflections with ease, slotting in raspy one-liners with breezy, swaggering melodies. Closing track “2excited” marks the moment the Earth swallows itself whole, with Saleh’s guttural wails descending against black metal and free jazz.
Saleh’s artful grasp of language can be traced back to their Sudanese roots. Born during the country’s Second Civil War, Saleh and their family fled to Eritrea where they spent time in a refugee camp. It was there Saleh encountered spoken word recited among the displaced to tell stories and pass down generational truths. Saleh describes Sudanese natives as naturally poetic in their dialect and how they verbalize Islamic text. Music was also a guiding force. The 30-year-old proudly points to women in their family who sing, play drums, and stringed instruments like oud.
After immigrating to the United States at age five, Saleh settled in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. In their senior year of high school, Saleh began performing poetry at open mic nights, garnering the attention of local publisher Button Poetry. But Saleh became burdened by the expectation for continuously solemn material, and music represented a more freeing alternative.
Singing a cappella at poetry jams and experimenting with melodies led to Saleh recording demos on their phone, uploading them to SoundCloud at the behest of friends. Their debut single “First Take” caught the attention of local producer Psymun, who helped Saleh put together their EP Nūr in 2019.
In the years since, Saleh has emerged as an important voice operating outside the mainstream. They spotlight issues that make people feel seen, from anti-queer rhetoric and identity confusion to refugee support and violence against women in their home country. Talking to Saleh, they speak with the knowledge and maturity gained through tumultuous life experiences. But they don’t wield it to gloat. They view it as a gift to emphasize and spread understanding.
I caught up with Saleh to talk about their new album, pre-show nerves, writing and performing poetry, their role in Sex Education, and the Earth’s climate crisis.
Since you’re about to perform, I was wondering how your emotions vary leading up to a performance. Does it depend on the show?
Dua Saleh: It ranges from wanting to throw up to jumping up and down and shaking Jesse – my music director’s – shoulders really hard.
Is it kind of cleansing in a way?
Dua Saleh: I don’t do that every time. Sometimes we’ll just jump around together, stretch together. He’s kind of like a yogi guy. He surfs and stuff. He’s very active. I think we’re both kind of ADHD. I probably shouldn’t be diagnosing other people.
How old were you when you started writing poetry?
Dua Saleh: I was three-years-old when I first started speaking my own words out loud. It was more an oration process, in the tradition of Sudanese poets and prose. I was really influenced by the Quran because I would sneak into Arabic school and try to learn the lessons. I would definitely get kicked out and chased away by the teachers, chased down to leave because I was three-years-old with 10-year-olds trying to figure out what was going on.
Were you able to absorb the lessons and teachings at three years old?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. I think Sudani people are also just poetic in our nature, in the way that we speak to each other.
I read that you encountered spoken word being recited in refugee camps. Do you think subconsciously that made you want to participate in your own way down the line?
Dua Saleh: I think I did not want to because I’m more introverted than people think I am. First time I performed my poetry was actually after I published my first poem as a kid. It was when I was 17 years old. It took a long time for me to do it, I think I almost did throw up. And it was just a small coffee shop that was famous in my hometown that was known for doing their open mics on Thursdays called Golden Thyme. I was just so nervous. I never spoken it out loud to another person other than to English teachers who pulled me aside and asked me if I was ok because of the content of my poetry.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Is it kind of cleansing in a way?
Dua Saleh: I don’t do that every time. Sometimes we’ll just jump around together, stretch together. He’s kind of like a yogi guy. He surfs and stuff. He’s very active. I think we’re both kind of ADHD. I probably shouldn’t be diagnosing other people.
How old were you when you started writing poetry?
Dua Saleh: I was three-years-old when I first started speaking my own words out loud. It was more an oration process, in the tradition of Sudanese poets and prose. I was really influenced by the Quran because I would sneak into Arabic school and try to learn the lessons. I would definitely get kicked out and chased away by the teachers, chased down to leave because I was three-years-old with 10-year-olds trying to figure out what was going on.
Were you able to absorb the lessons and teachings at three years old?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. I think Sudani people are also just poetic in our nature, in the way that we speak to each other.
I read that you encountered spoken word being recited in refugee camps. Do you think subconsciously that made you want to participate in your own way down the line?
Dua Saleh: I think I did not want to because I’m more introverted than people think I am. First time I performed my poetry was actually after I published my first poem as a kid. It was when I was 17 years old. It took a long time for me to do it, I think I almost did throw up. And it was just a small coffee shop that was famous in my hometown that was known for doing their open mics on Thursdays called Golden Thyme. I was just so nervous. I never spoken it out loud to another person other than to English teachers who pulled me aside and asked me if I was ok because of the content of my poetry.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
How old were you when you started writing poetry?
Dua Saleh: I was three-years-old when I first started speaking my own words out loud. It was more an oration process, in the tradition of Sudanese poets and prose. I was really influenced by the Quran because I would sneak into Arabic school and try to learn the lessons. I would definitely get kicked out and chased away by the teachers, chased down to leave because I was three-years-old with 10-year-olds trying to figure out what was going on.
Were you able to absorb the lessons and teachings at three years old?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. I think Sudani people are also just poetic in our nature, in the way that we speak to each other.
I read that you encountered spoken word being recited in refugee camps. Do you think subconsciously that made you want to participate in your own way down the line?
Dua Saleh: I think I did not want to because I’m more introverted than people think I am. First time I performed my poetry was actually after I published my first poem as a kid. It was when I was 17 years old. It took a long time for me to do it, I think I almost did throw up. And it was just a small coffee shop that was famous in my hometown that was known for doing their open mics on Thursdays called Golden Thyme. I was just so nervous. I never spoken it out loud to another person other than to English teachers who pulled me aside and asked me if I was ok because of the content of my poetry.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Were you able to absorb the lessons and teachings at three years old?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. I think Sudani people are also just poetic in our nature, in the way that we speak to each other.
I read that you encountered spoken word being recited in refugee camps. Do you think subconsciously that made you want to participate in your own way down the line?
Dua Saleh: I think I did not want to because I’m more introverted than people think I am. First time I performed my poetry was actually after I published my first poem as a kid. It was when I was 17 years old. It took a long time for me to do it, I think I almost did throw up. And it was just a small coffee shop that was famous in my hometown that was known for doing their open mics on Thursdays called Golden Thyme. I was just so nervous. I never spoken it out loud to another person other than to English teachers who pulled me aside and asked me if I was ok because of the content of my poetry.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
I read that you encountered spoken word being recited in refugee camps. Do you think subconsciously that made you want to participate in your own way down the line?
Dua Saleh: I think I did not want to because I’m more introverted than people think I am. First time I performed my poetry was actually after I published my first poem as a kid. It was when I was 17 years old. It took a long time for me to do it, I think I almost did throw up. And it was just a small coffee shop that was famous in my hometown that was known for doing their open mics on Thursdays called Golden Thyme. I was just so nervous. I never spoken it out loud to another person other than to English teachers who pulled me aside and asked me if I was ok because of the content of my poetry.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Was writing and performing poetry a natural transition into making music?
Dua Saleh: No, music was out of nowhere. Music arrived to me in a package from God when I really needed it. I never really sang. I was never in a choir. I was around people who would recite Islamic text, obviously. I listened to a lot of music. I was obsessed as a music listener. Initially I wanted to be a music journalist at some point in my teenage years.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
So you built up that onstage confidence doing poetry. Going into music, did you have to build up that confidence again on stage?
Dua Saleh: Actually I don’t think I got as nervous from poetry to music for some reason. I think it was because I was in a trance-like state. I was hypnotized by the melodies that were coming to me. So I was like rocking myself back-and-forth and had the child-like need to share my work with others because I discovered I could do something I never imagined I could possibly do.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Do those melodies just come to you as you’re hearing the beats?
Dua Saleh: I don’t know how they come to me. I think there’s just a ping in my mind that happens and then a melody’s just there and I’ll start humming it. And that’s how I’ll discover the song often times. Sometimes I’ll write the song beforehand and I’ll think of words and pop culture references that are helpful with staying with the times. I think for the most part it’s always a happy surprise.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
You’ve said in the past that music is cathartic whereas poetry focuses on struggle and hardship. Why do you think music is the ideal forum for expressing these wildly different emotions?
Dua Saleh: Because music moves the body physically. It accesses a part of your brain that releases serotonin and that also offers relief. There’s many different things that music can do. It can be a reflection of you, it can be a reflection of the times. It can be imaginative. So I think it’s freeing. It feels like breathing in oxygen.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Was your first exposure to music growing up in Sudan or was it when you settled in the US? Like when you really got into it?
Dua Saleh: No, I’ve always been into music. Sudani people love music, will bust out into the songs that are popular in our town or if there’s a popular singer. Or just like folk songs that are actually like passed down from generation to generation. Like my siblings went to Sudan before this recent Civil War broke out, or before the coup happened in Sudan. And I literally was so jealous because it was just like my aunties whipping out drums suddenly singing songs that I didn’t know because I didn’t grow up in Sudan and didn’t get taught. Everybody just sings all the time. A lot of people play instruments. I talked about this in another interview where my aunties know how to play stringed instruments and know how to play drums and oud. Which isn’t really that common in some countries in the area just because of patriarchy but I feel like music allows us to transcend imperialism and whatever dictates what a woman can do and a non-binary person can do.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
How was it going up in that environment with that kind of turmoil being a kid?
Dua Saleh: It made me empathetic in a way that allows me to have an intellectually robust understanding of the world. Just because I understand what’s going on a lot of the time out of necessity. Just being a kid who is witnessing my mom go through different things and witnessing my parents literally have to navigate being displaced persons and understanding that there are different elements of dimension of everything. With I Should Call Them, the album is about climate change, but a lot of my understanding of climate change came from just very human experiences with knowing that there’s a lot of runoff as a result of weaponry exploding and crops are being burned as a way to deplete resources, to gain access to gold and ore and to oil.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
That’s a perfect segue because I was going to say your new album feels very relevant right now given the devastation of the LA fires. Obviously there were plenty of natural disasters before this, but will it feel surreal to perform songs against that kind of backdrop?
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
I’m aware of the ways that the environment is being detrimented as a result of warfare, which a lot of people don’t think about warfare in that way. They think about it in a way that is emphatic to human existence, just like being alive and being displaced and not having access to food. But all of those things are intertwined with one another and I see it as a blessing in a way to have access to that knowledge which a lot of people don’t have access to. Just like reframing is how I cope with that.
Dua Saleh: Yeah. To be honest, I thought about canceling the show. I was talking to my team about that because it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to experience and to have in your body and feel anxiety about. But while I was in VIP, one of my supporters mentioned that they needed this moment to be uplifted and that it was a necessity to be together and to share space and to be able to feel normal again. Those people drove from hours away just to be able to get to the show. I’m really grateful to my beautiful fanbase. They’re just so dedicated. But it’s heartbreaking. I definitely have just love for people at this time.
It sounds like this project was written during a bit of a whirlwind when you were on your first tour, had just finished filming for Sex Education, all while coming to terms with a breakup. What kind of headspace were you in during all this?
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: It was a lot of information that my body was processing and my therapist was telling me that you don’t really have to just talk about the deep-seated trauma. You can also talk about your feelings, getting your feelings hurt by your ex-girlfriend or feeling guilt and learning from that emotion and becoming a better lover to somebody in the future, becoming a better partner. I feel like there’s a lot that comes with it and I feel like all those things were suppressed. I didn’t think that you were supposed to talk about those things because it seems silly, like we brush it aside. It all came out because I had no time – I was moving so quickly. I was literally moving from city to city. Sometimes I was going back and re-shooting stuff for Sex Education and I was trying to figure out how to just, like, breathe. Because I didn’t have those moments, I literally just locked into the emotions.
Did you see parallels in how we treat the Earth versus the toxic things we’ll do in a dysfunctional relationship?
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: I was thinking about all that was going on in the world. Seeing all the viral diseases and illnesses that were going wild just because livestock are being kept in like huge factory farms together and there’s all this manure piling up and all these things. Birds are being influenced by this. The water is being polluted. The Earth is degrading, being degraded literally by all the excess that we have and all the toxic waste we produce. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you feel like you’re going to lose the one thing that’s important to you. The Earth is the one thing that we have, that we can hold on to. She’s the very being that gave us life, that offers us water. Not being toxic. Knowing that right now we’re reaping the consequences of our actions. Seeing oil rigs explode in Northern California, seeing all these fires bloom. Us reaching temperatures that we’ve never reached before. There literally is a hole in the ozone that we’re all just normalizing. We’re all just okay with it at this point because it’s just our reality. There’s so much that’s going on and the Earth is fighting back.
“2excited” is a very unique track. I love how uneasy the tension is before descending into chaos with these clashing genres. Where did the inspiration come for doing a track like that?
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: I wanted to scream on a track. I was thinking about an ex and I was so frustrated and so traumatized by their actions that I needed to scream this out.
It was going to be directed at something toxic or not unhealthy if it wasn’t on wax.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: Yeah, it was going to come out one way or another. I wanted it to be in a controlled environment. I told the executive producers that I wanted to do this and they were like ‘That’s cool. Let’s try to intertwine the elements that we already have with the album being R&B with black metal music.’ We actually had two different jam sessions. One allowed for the contemporary R&B and the free jazz elements. The other was just straight up just black metal and me screaming and people shredding bass, shredding guitar, drums going wild. It was probably one of the best experiences that I’ve had in a studio.
The two tracks before it “television” and “coast” are so sultry and sensual. And then you get hit with “2excited”. How do you gear shift like that in a studio session?
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: It’s pretty easy. I make music all the time. There’s probably 1000 songs that I have unreleased just because I’m a studio rat. I love being a part of the creation process with people. Maybe I’m a little bossy when it comes to the production but it’s still fun to be a part of a music ecosystem with other people.
What kind of preparation did you do for your role in Sex Education?
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.
Dua Saleh: They understood that I had anxiety about it so I asked them about getting me an acting coach for the audition. That was really helpful. I hadn’t watched it because I thought it was a kids show and it felt inappropriate to watch a kids show called Sex Education. I just binged it. Some of the preparation happened during it. Jemima Kirke actually was helpful with advice. She was telling me about how she method acts. For her role for Sex Education, she kind of removed herself from us as much as she could and would sit in different rooms because she wanted to be cold because she’s not naturally cold. That made me think about Cal (Bowman). It immersed me in the experience of being a trans teenager and trying to understand what it’s like and also just processing my own story through Cal so I would better understand it. So going through and writing songs that were influenced by those moments where I was thinking about dysphoria. I was thinking about systemic violence as it relates to trans identity. I was thinking about emotions that I have relayed to family members after coming out to them as non-binary. All these things that I experienced, I put that into Cal. I was even creating music through their lens in a way.