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Interview: Hanging with Habibi

JYL_1578The ladies of Habibi make the kind of music that I can listen to for days. This Brooklyn-based group spins delicate surf-pop songs with grace and super sweet harmonies. Here, they talk to us about their namesake, the mysticism of Persian Queens, and their tour with Burger Records.


So Habibi means “my love” in Arabic and I’ve read that your lyrics reference a she that is the Habibi heroine. Can you tell me more about her? What is she like? How does she view the world?

Rahill: Well, I don’t know. I like to write about a defiant, independent, nomadic woman, who sort of just goes to the beat of her own drum. I guess its reflective of what I want to be or what I see us as. She’s really just a heroine, an exotic female who’s doing her own thing.

Awesome. So I’ve read you’re fascinated with Middle Eastern folklore. Can you tell us one of your favorite stories?

[laughter]

Lenny: Oh no!

Rahill: Lenaya knows a lot about theology.

Lenny:  I wrote a song a long time ago, in another band. It was old folklore about the thieves that would kill people on the pathway in order to get to paradise. They always intrigued me quite a bit. You know, the Persian Queens to Zenobia are always amazing to read about, but, I’m not freshly brushed up on it [laughter]. Back to you, Rahill.

Rahill: Well, the story of Hassan Sabbah and the Assassins is really incredible.  This dude was the grandmaster to a gang of warriors called The Assassins, who were a group of rowdy merciless killer dudes in ancient Persia. Before Hassan Sabbah would take his warriors on quests, he would drug them with hashish, put them in a deep sleep and drag them into a beautiful garden with hot naked chicks. When they awoke they had no idea they were drugged, but they would be totally hallucinating and thinking they were in paradise. Then that would give them a surge of, like, “Now you have seen paradise, now you can go and kill all of these people.” Totally crazy! And that’s also where the word assassin is derived from, in Arabic, from this guy. It’s all really cool stuff.

Wow. Yeah, I really want to check it out.   

Lenaya: Watch the movie 300. [laughs]

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Yeah, I saw that… I fell asleep, wasn’t feeling it. [laughter] Maybe I need to watch it again. But tell us about your debut album. What was the recording process like?

Erin: We got all the songs and we started recording it in the winter, and we just weren’t getting the right sounds. I had recorded some of our stuff previously because it was cheap to do. This time I didn’t want to be involved in the recording process, so I could focus more on playing. Instead of like moving mics and checking everything.

I mean, I like doing that, but it was good to be more involved on the playing side. So we finally redid all of the songs in the spring, and things came out a lot better. Maybe it was just our mental mindset, or the room we did it in.

Karen: Well, Lenny, our guitarist had to leave for a bit from the band, because of personal stuff. We had our close friend Caroline Partamian join, initially she was a replacement for Lenny at SXSW but then Lenny still couldn’t come back so she began playing with us. At the point of recording, we had started recording with her, but everything wasn’t sounding like how it had originally sounded.

Erin: Since she hadn’t originally written the songs it was difficult to get them to sound the way we use to play them. She just had her own, different sound.

Rahill: It kind of motivated us – well, me – to ask Lenny to come back, and she came to record and everything sounded perfect. It became a longer process, but we were really happy with the results. And we recorded really close to here, actually.

Oh yeah?

Karen: Yeah, and another thing is we got to record a lot of old songs that we hadn’t played in a while that we all really wanted to be on the album. So, coming back in the spring and doing all these songs with Lenny felt really good and came out right.

Lenny: We got to do our harmonizing. It’d been gone a long time, but, I was like, wow, I forgot how much I love singing with these ladies.

Erin: It was really fun because we got to add some extra layers and stuff and I could kind step back in the technical aspect. But it helped to also know what kind of sound we wanted and so we could just tell Jay Heiselmann, who recorded us, ‘Oh it should sound like this.’ And he got it. He totally knew what we were going for, so it was really awesome.

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Tell us about your upcoming West Coast tour with Burger Records and the Burger Band and Lee and all that.

Karen: Yeah! We’re stoked [laughter] I don’t know. We met Lee  and Sean way back and he’s a total doll.

Erin: Well, I’ve known Lee and Sean for almost a decade. That seems like a long ass time.

Rahill: But Lee and Sean really helped us out. Before we even had established any work relationship with Burger Records they asked us to play three of their shows at SXSW, which really was huge for us.

Karen: They treat us like family. They really do, so we decided to stick with them.

Erin: Basically they were like, “You know if you guys want to put out an album with us, we’d be so into it.” So we didn’t even need to shop around.

I saw something about cassettes – do they do cassettes of new songs?

Rahill: They do both, they do a lot of reissues. They do a lot with bands like The Black Lips, Ariel Pink, or people clearly on more established [labels], and they re-release their albums on cassettes.

Erin: Right, right. They’ll release their tape. And so with bands that Burger does put out, they sometimes only release a tape, or like for us they’re doing a limited run of tapes and then they’re going to do a limited color vinyl and then a regular record.

Karen: And digital and CD, too.

Rahill: It’s going to be in every format possible [laughter].

So everything is available on their site?

Lenny: Yes, but the record isn’t out yet.

Erin: October 29th is the initial LP release.

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And do you have any music videos coming out in the near future?

Rahill: Have you ever watched Wonder Showzenyou know, like PFFR?  Like The Heart, She Holleror Delocated, these weird/awesome television shows? Well the writer/director of those shows is my boss, John Lee. And he’s been really supportive and helpful with the band and is going to be filming a music video for us in September! Another friend of mine EJ, also an amazing artist, is going to shoot one for another song!

Karen: We haven’t really done a proper one. We had some French girl do one that was really rad.

The “Tomboy” One?

Karen: No, not that one was like home video style on our iphones drunk at SXSW!

I thought it was cute.

Erin: Haha yeah, well, not the best representation of the band. James Franco actually used our song for a short he directed. That was weird too.

Rahill: Yeah, but it was in a commercial for jeans.

Erin: But these two will be proper, we’ll have a say in it, and it’ll be more professional.

That’s awesome. I’d love to see some of your videos. I think they’ll be really cool. Last question – what should we expect from you guys in the next couple of months? We have the tour, the music videos in September, but what’s going on after that?

Lenny: We have our record release party.

Let’s talk about that.

Lenny: I think we are planning for a record release at the end of October or early November. We aren’t sure yet who we will be playing with, but we want it to be a really special night!

Rahill: Yeah, then we have the Burgerama Tour in the beginning of October with a caravan of awesome Burger bands on the east coast. We’re really looking forward to it, going to be going down the east coast to Atlanta.

Karen: We’re really excited for that.

Do you know what bands?

Karen: Yeah. Our pals in Gap DreamThe Growlers, they seem like cool dudes. I wouldn’t call them friends yet [laughter]. Pangea, Cosmonauts, and Colleen Green. We’re going to be playing with our buds in The Black Lips in Atlanta, but they’re not touring with us. They’re just going to be down there. Just a lot of bands. Basically every connection to Burger possible [laughs].

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Interview by Nasa Hadizadeh. Find her online @nasa_nasa_nasa
Photos by Jackie Lee.



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