THEY SAY // OUT NOW
Artwork image by Nia Fekri design by Christian Johnstone
They Say // OUT NOW on all streaming platforms here.
They Say is a new single by musician, composer and performer Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani. It began life as a poem Zahra had written about her son—her desire to protect him, and the healing she wished for, for the both of them. How do we find peace for ourselves and the ones we love?
The foundations of the track are laid through loops of steel pan drums and a beat made with body percussion, a rhythmic ritual Zahra performs with its roots in a form of Persian prayer during which you sing while your hand beats against your chest. This embodied movement is reflected in the imagery of mother and son as celestial bodies, connecting melody to lyrics. “Even if you let the sky and stars fall on me, I am the moon and I will always be close by.” The lengths we go to to care for those we love. We become the moon for them.
The music video, directed by Nia Fekri, is embellished with this celestial imagery, the mythic and the cosmic eroding any sense of time and place. Zahra exists in a dream state, dancing submerged in a body of water. The moon reflected in the ripples as they ebb and flow. Reflection shows its face throughout both lyrics and visuals. There's a resonance with Celtic folklore surrounding rivers, the murkiness of their depths hiding spirits that lurk beneath the surface. There’s an air of unknowing enhanced by the mist that stretches its hands across the water. The night creeps on.
Opening with repetitions of the line, “Numb, I forget my spine, how to sit with pride”, the song reminds us of how trauma lives in the bones, nestles its way in to find a spot to sink its teeth into. It suffocates. Healing forces us to relearn connection, rehome our sense of self inside the body. Zahra treads carefully between the borders of strength and vulnerability, back and forth, as she searches for what it means to recover. She comes back to the old adage, again and again: “It’ll pass they say, time heals they say”. There’s tension in the pause between these words. A complexity of feeling. Her voice loops the lyric in flow, mirroring the current of these empty comforts—well intentioned though they be—that washes over the unbearable strength it takes for survivors to recover in the aftermath of abuse.
This is a song about survival. It will leave you sitting with, reckoning with, the word resilience. Turning its syllables over and over in your head, wrapping your tongue around its sounds that leave a bitter taste. What does it mean to be strong? What’s more, why is this continually asked of survivors—don’t we deserve to be soft for once, to be supported? To allow ourselves the elusive rest we crave and seldom find.
In the centre, it unfolds. “It’s a choice”, she sings with steadiness, assurance. “To help him heal while we orbit, it’s a choice.” It’s easier to lose yourself in the spiral, to let the vastness swallow you. But in the silence, she affirms, there is one thing for them to hold onto—each other’s orbit. Zahra and her son ground themselves in the other’s gravity. “Connected by him the sun”, the moon locates her home in the surrounding chaos, realised, with such tenderness, in the bond shared between the two.
To survive is to hold on to what you can find. Hold on to healing. The passage of time. Hold on to the drums, the rituals, the water. A cleansing from all that came before. To hope. And through the darkness in which she sings, Zahra’s desire to provide protection, peace, and light for her child is the driving force behind her new sound. This is a work of boundless care. It fills rooms and rooms. The love she carries emanates, echoes reverberating in the slow build of steel pan beats, in hands beating against the chest, against the water. A prayer for when there are no words to say.