The world out there is loud and desperately seeking to get your attention. It will stop at nothing to make you engage with it from the moment you wake up until when you’re ready to rest your head. What does it want with you? Is it anything so important that it should always require you to be on call?
No, for the most part, it merely wants to sell you a fresh product and needs to know your attention isn’t drifting. But allowing your imagination to soar, dip, and do summersaults, is a way to ensure you are connected to your true self. It’s also not an exercise that is easy to perform.
Just Leila is working to get in touch with herself on the latest EP, “just for me,” and in doing so, find a connection with those working on themselves in a similar way.
The EP’s opener, “bits of pieces” serves to put the listener at ease, as well as Leila’s busy subconscious. The singer reassures us that “we are part of it all,” and confesses to her many artistic endeavours, all designed to keep her close to her true self.
The songwriter favours a hybrid sound that mixes French pop, electronic sounds and Northern African melodic ideas with pure poetry. The innocent-sounding “bébé?” works all of these ideas together.
But the record is also driven by angst. You can only be an artist as long as you create art, right? This is, at least, the idea that haunts Leila. Stopping would mean accepting defeat, and that might easily involve losing one’s gifts. “don’t be alarmed” and “ché pas” express that never-ending search for vitality and inspiration.
Even the most daring explorers, however, have nightmares chasing at their heels. Just Leila acknowledges hers and allows them to serve as inspiration for the haunting “more than dna” and “desert song.”
Finally, the EP’s closer, “just for me”, allows the singer to present her intentions clearly over a hypnotic, Middle-Eastern vocal chant. As Leila confesses, if there was one thing that the project sought to attain, it was a desire to present art that was entirely hers to own and to gift.
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