Dreamy, foggy and pensive – that’s what Saudi singer and producer Al7amdan’s latest release, “Hawajees,” feels like. The title, which in Arabic refers to anxious thoughts, recurring worries, or the deep inner musings that occupy the mind, is an apt description of where the song takes us.
Al7amdan’s subtle singing, almost resembling a folkloric hum, floats over guitar chords that keep circling back on themselves throughout the song. There is no catchy chorus, no ear-stealing bridge, no obvious moment designed to pull you in. Instead, “Hawajees” unfolds almost like a folkloric tale being quietly told to you, gradually drawing you toward the landscape it seems to belong to: the desert.
In recent years, we’ve seen artists across the region and its diaspora attempt to merge musical worlds from vastly different corners of the globe. Sometimes those encounters feel natural; other times, the distance between the genres becomes impossible to ignore. With “Hawajees,” however, Al7amdan’s approach feels particularly peculiar and specific.
Coming from Riyadh, he draws from Sheila, a traditional form of chanted, lyrical poetry deeply rooted in the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf and Yemen. But rather than taking his own traditional genre and making it meet another, Al7amdan does almost the exact opposite: he takes country music and brings it to Sheila.
It’s a pairing that hasn’t been explored much musically in the region, yet somehow, it doesn’t feel alien. Country music, much like Sheila, developed in landscapes shaped by vastness, isolation and the desert – from Texas and Arizona to California. The genres may have emerged thousands of kilometres apart and from entirely different cultural histories, but the geographical similarities between their worlds create an unexpected point of connection.
In “Hawajees,” that connection begins to reveal itself through sound: two traditions shaped by open landscapes meeting somewhere in between them.
Al7amdan’s latest is a showcase of how deliberate genre-crossing, when approached naturally, can open unexpected horizons for the main genre at its core – whether through new harmonies, melodic structures, production techniques, textures or instrumentation. Where the original genre isn’t lost beneath these new layers; if anything, the opposite happens – it is magnified through them.
