A lot of the songs we heard in the afternoon were destined to a project Ben and I had started a few years back after I moved to Tangier, which was inspired by that quote from American writer and Tanjawi-by-adoption Paul Bowles:

“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where he had felt most at home.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

It was very interesting to revisit those songs. While unrelated to the nature of the album we are now dwelling on, their spirit was undeniably connected to that ongoing motion of life I started to model my existence on years ago, and what my life eventually became while cultivating its flow every single day. It also portrayed Ben’s fabulous ability to incarnate my words through his unique emotional musicality. It’s so meaningful for me to see him bloom as he does after what seems like a lifelong servitude to his own affective specters. Music speaks volumes by its essence, but the layers of inner self silences we believe no one can hear reverberate way louder than any of the distortion you want others to focus on while you suffer internally. We’re greatly damaged, but not broken beyond repair. It’s a magnificent blessing to be seated right beside Ben every day and to see him be who he decides to be, especially after decades of witnessing him struggling to try and convince himself by pretending to everyone else that he was somebody he had never been at all… Are we a tourist or a traveler when it comes to being honest with ourselves, when it comes to taking a chance at presenting that real self as it is to others around… It’s never that easy, particularly when most of everything and most of everyone on public display seems too fake to even have to care trying to make it believable…