Emel Mathlouthi Wants to Put Out the Fire

Emel Mathlouthi named her upcoming album Everywhere We Looked Was Burning, and she wants you to listen. When Inside Arabia spoke with the Tunisian singer, an unprecedented spate of fires had been raging in the Amazon rainforest for months. She was quick to mention those infernos, and that the forest’s chief custodian, Brazil, was looking on with apathy. 

“Everywhere we look is burning,” Mathlouthi said.

“Everywhere we look is burning,” Mathlouthi said. “In the last couple of days, I’ve seen a funeral for the first glacier that died in Iceland. I’ve been seeing in Tunisia there’s serious heat waves that I don’t remember from when I was younger.”

Mathlouthi, whose spacious electronic anthems often reflect the world’s pain, offered her voice as a buffer to those flames. Her third album, released on September 27, is as much a requiem for all that has been lost as it is a call to arms to protect what is left. “It is a tribute to nature, to mother nature, to which we belong,” she told Inside Arabia. 

Singing for Revolution

Mathlouthi rose into the public spotlight in 2011, when her song “Kelmti Horra” (“My Word is Free”) became a kind of rallying cry for the Tunisian Revolution. A video went viral of her singing that anthem in a protest in Tunis on the eve of autocratic President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s ouster. When a post-revolution Tunisian civil society organization won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, Mathlouthi performed “Kelmti Horra” at the awards ceremony.

But, Mathlouthi told Inside Arabia, “I never really identified myself as an activist, because my big commitment is to my music, being a singer.” In a way, her renown as “the Voice of the Tunisian Revolution” has hemmed her in. Media tend to fixate on that part of her career, and locate her relevance there.

“When you sing in Arabic and you’re trying to make a career in the Western countries, you’re [not able] to let your music define itself,” Mathlouthi explained. “I feel that in the media, you already have a spot and that’s where you belong.” 

Today, the climate crisis looms larger than any other terror, so she’s singing for the earth.

She is proud of her past, but it is the past: “I feel like I am evolving, I am exploring.”

As Mathlouthi describes it, her music is “a reflection of what’s happening in the world.” In 2011, Tunisia’s revolution was central, so she sang for it. Today, the climate crisis looms larger than any other terror, so she’s singing for the earth.

Roots in the Woods

Naturally, her new album has its roots in the forest. Today, Mathlouthi lives in New York City, a place she adores for its overflow of creativity and artistic collaborators. But when she needs space to breathe, she finds refuge in the verdant Catskill Mountains several hours north.

“I went to Woodstock [in the Catskills] by myself and spent a month in the quiet, in a little house in the forest,” she said. “I tried to come up with new ideas and write new songs and see which direction it would take.”

While her first two albums inhabited the dark shadows of human tragedy, Everywhere We Looked Was Burning is sheltered in the dark shadows of a wounded forest.

The result, Everywhere We Looked Was Burning, could be a soundtrack for the march of the Ents—the ancient, tree-like beings from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings who bring crushing revenge upon a villainous, forest-burning wizard. While her first two albums, Kelmti Horra and Ensen, inhabited the dark shadows of human tragedy, Everywhere is sheltered in the dark shadows of a wounded forest.

The pounding industrial pulse of her previous albums has loosened into sinewy, cinematic swells. It is a grand, heavy soundscape, hinting at her past in a metal band. Mathlouthi’s high and haunting voice leaves behind Tunisian Arabic to sing English lyrics that are at times too cryptic. It all seems to hover on the precipice of something big.

The three singles released so far—“Footsteps,” “Rescuer,” and “Wakers of the Winds” — all have music videos in which land holds a strong presence. They are apocalyptic, she said, but with the possibility of redemption.

Nature is woven into the whole album, she explained. “Sometimes it’s a character among others and sometimes many characters at once. Sometimes it’s the victim, the wounded; sometimes it becomes the tyrant, the angry forest.” 

Nature is woven into the whole album, she explained. “Sometimes it’s a character among others and sometimes many characters at once. Sometimes it’s the victim, the wounded; sometimes it becomes the tyrant, the angry forest.” 

Sounds of water, ocean, and fire meld into the instrumentals. “[I’m] trying to connect nature and music,” Mathlouthi said, “the way it was naturally connected back when we discovered music.”

The Right Landscape

She and her international cast of collaborators recorded most of the album at the foot of the mountains, in a studio in the town of Catskill, on the shore of the Hudson River.

In the warm months, the Catskill’s forests are defiantly alive, almost embarrassingly green. Most of them are old growth, never cut by human hands. Stumps of a 385-million-year-old fossilized forest—the oldest ever found—were unearthed in those mountains. The woods of the foothills, however, were once almost extinguished, shaved down by European colonists to make space for crops and animals. But they managed to be reborn and grow abundant. 

Likewise, Mathlouthi’s album is dark and mournful, but she intentionally shifted the gloomy title into the past tense: Everywhere We Looked Was Burning.

“O.K., that’s what happened,” she explained. “So what are we doing about it now? [There is] a possibility of doing something about it. But at the same time, I wanted to make an alarming statement. It’s not the time to do music just to enjoy the song. It’s time to shake people. Things that mattered 30 years ago, now everything is trivial.”

Next to the behemoths of government or global environmental destruction, a song feels minuscule and claims of its power can feel hubristic… “Music can be powerful because it attracts the attention of all the parts of the body. Music and art should always challenge people and always stimulate.”

Mathlouthi wrote that her song “Rescuer” conjures the first rays of daylight emerging from the horizon: “It’s a moment to revive power.” Next to the behemoths of government or global environmental destruction, a song feels minuscule and claims of its power can feel hubristic. “Kelmti Horra” did not topple a president, but it did at least offer a mantra to keep moving forward. 

“The passion that I put into my music is hope,” Mathlouthi said. “Music can be powerful because it attracts the attention of all the parts of the body. Music and art should always challenge people and always stimulate.” People have become numb, she says, and music can help rescue their senses.

Her outlook is now global, but her passion for her home country has not faded. Much has changed since 2011—President Essebsi, who led the post-revolution democracy, passed away on July 25 of this year and the first round of presidential elections were held in mid-September.

“Unfortunately the political scene is terrible,” she lamented. “It’s such a contest of mediocrity. I see the same mediocre people [who] do not deserve to lead such a wonderful, promising country. But I feel that the civil society is very alert and very ready to take action.” She also looks with hope towards Algeria, itself deep in the throes of a transformative, nonviolent revolution.

 Mathlouthi’s music is monumental, at times even grandiose. But her life also revolves around something very small—her 5-year-old daughter, Sjor. Raising a child, she said, has made her more empathetic and sensitive to the state of the world.

“It’s very challenging because you’re shaping somebody else’s future while you are unsure of your own,” she said. “It makes you really reflect on how to be, how to behave. You need to constantly inspire your children and constantly bring the best part of who you are.”

For Mathlouthi, the best she can bring is her voice, sung loud and clear. 

~~~~~

Emel Mathlouthi performs at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C. on October 17, 2019.