The opening track for Azniv Korkejian's fourth album as Bedouine, Neon Summer Skin, evokes a perfect day from childhood. "I was always taken to the pool, where my only concern was when the sun began to set," she says in a call from Los Angeles. "Later, my mom and dad bathe me in the bathroom and put me to bed." Infused with the dreamy voice of 20th-century soft pop, the track is more than just a nostalgic exercise. "I wanted to paint a picture of what it feels like to feel secure," she says. "Because a lot of the record doesn't allow for the luxury of considering your own security. I've been thinking a lot about Palestinian and Lebanese children who don't have that right."
The ongoing conflicts in the Middle East have provided context for Neon Summer Skin, but the album's themes of displacement, identity, and vulnerability - wrapped in the deceptively soft sound of 20th-century MOR pop - are also personal. Korkejian's family is Armenian, but she and her parents were born in Syria, and her brothers were born in Saudi Arabia, where the Korkejians lived in "an American compound that was like a gated community," until 1995. That year, scared by the Gulf War's proximity, the family successfully applied for a green card lottery and moved to the US. "And thank God, because eventually we'd have to go back to Syria," Korkejian says. "I don't know what would have happened then."
At ten years old, Korkejian couldn't have known she'd escaped the Syrian civil war. "For a few years, I was resentful of the move," she recalls. Her first Halloween in Massachusetts highlighted the culture shock, "that feeling of being able to just keep walking forever, instead of the finite parameters of our gated community."
Eventually, the US became home. At 18, she left for college in Los Angeles, where she studied sound editing. Along the way, she picked up a pawn shop guitar, learned to fingerpick, wrote songs for films shot by her classmates and professors, and dreamed of being a singer-songwriter. But for years, songwriting was "just an intuitive form of self-expression, like keeping a diary," she says. Perhaps that's why, when she began releasing albums a decade ago, her early records were intimate and conspiratorial, as if you'd won the trust of an insightful person against a wall, now releasing sour observations they'd quietly accumulated. Neon Summer Skin is different, inspired by her parents' second exit from Saudi Arabia. "They returned after their children left home, but you can't get citizenship in Saudi Arabia if you're not Arab, so even though he'd worked there for decades, when he retired, they moved to Armenia," Korkejian says. "Syria wasn't safe because of the war."
She began writing these songs after her last visit to Saudi Arabia in 2019. "I'd often visit my parents whenever I traveled, reliving childhood every minute, savoring every moment. Now I had the feeling that I'd never go back." She pauses. "Devastation, death, and murder in the region... Our family is experiencing the best-case scenario. We're all healthy, there's food on the table. But we're separated, and visiting is difficult, sometimes impossible. I miss the deaths of my grandmother and aunt, who were in Syria during the war. You can escape the massacre, but there's still a long tail of grief, separated from the people and places that matter to you."
She wrote the melancholic On My Own, "the thesis" for the album's themes, back in LA, on piano instead of guitar. "I dove into this recently learned critical term, 'the halfway point'," she says. "Carol King. Elton John. Todd Rundgren. I wanted more emotional expression, more melodic movement, more crunch" - a goal that helped guests Lemon Twigs and Jonathan Rado of Foxygen. Despite moving away from the intimate singer-songwriter format of her earlier records, Neon Summer Skin is Korkejian's most personal work. At its heart is Canopies, another story of displacement and loss that tells how Korkejian's grandmother put her mother in an orphanage for Armenian genocide children to protect her from an abusive husband. Its opening line - "I loved you too much to keep you, so I committed a crime" - captures the tragedy with grace. "My mother talks about her mother who made that sacrifice to protect her," Korkejian says. "It was done out of love. But as a child, it was hard for her to understand."
Pain is a theme that ties these songs together, but so is love. To help promote the album, Korkejian plans to display old photos of her parents when they lived in Syria and Lebanon. It's a project she admits is "sentimental," but also serious. "Middle Eastern people are often perceived as violent and terrible, and there's pity too," she says. "I want to humanize them. I think it's like when an algorithm shows you things like, "Did you know Iranians wore bikinis?" and in these 70s photos, her parents look remarkably cool. They were so hippie and beautiful."
