[music]

Kate Hinds: You're listening to All Of It. I'm Kate Hinds in for Alison Stewart. Let's wrap up today's show with a listening party.

[Music - Habibi: In My Dreams]

Kate Hinds: That was an exclusive sneak peep of Habibi's In My Dreams. This Friday, May 31st, the five-member indie rock band is set to release their third studio album titled Dream Machine. Since forming in 2011, Habibi gained critical acclaim for their unique blend of eras and cultures. A follow-up to their 2020 album titled Anywhere But Here, the new album Dream Machine is a fusion of post-punk, experimental pop, and vintage disco, all filtered through Habibi's shared love of Middle Eastern psychedelic music.

To discuss the album, we're joined by the band's co-founders. Rahill Jamalifard is the group's lead vocalist and a musician from Lansing, Michigan. Hi, Rahill.

Rahill Jamalifard: Hi. How are you doing,?

Kate Hinds: Good. How are you?

Rahill Jamalifard: Great.

Kate Hinds: We've also got Lenny Lynch, the group's guitarist, and a vocalist, also from Michigan. Lenny, welcome to All Of It.

Lenny Lynch: Hi. Thanks for having us today.

Kate Hinds: Thank you so much for joining us. Rahill, let's start with the title of the album Dream Machine. It suggests a journey into the realm of dreams and the subconscious. What inspired the direction of this album and how does it resonate with your vision?

Rahill Jamalifard: Well, the Dream Machine we based it on the title of late 1950s invention. Basically, it was like a catalyst to get you into-- it was like a light fixture that was supposed to bring on hallucinations through oscillating lights that are set on LP on a record player. It's just this idea of getting catalyzed into our dreams. Being basically thrown into our dreamscapes, and answer to our Anywhere But Here, we wanted to keep it going, basically, and get lost in our fantasy world that is like a saving grace for the things that keep us tethered to the earth with all the things happening.

Kate Hinds: You've said there's always a desire for transcendence in our music. What does that mean to you?

Rahill Jamalifard: I think we listen to music for an escape sometimes or just an answer that we don't have, whether that's to our loneliness, to whatever emotion we're dealing with that day, and so I feel like music is able to elevate that, and bridge whatever gap is missing. I think in doing so, we transcend where we feel and we use music as a vehicle to get there.

Kate Hinds: Lenny, you've talked about music critics and fans associating Habibi sound with this bubble gum sweet and innocent sound when you first were starting. Tell us how your sound has developed over the last 11 years and what prompted the changes.

Lenny Lynch: Excuse me. Sorry. I'm still had a flu last week. Basically, we were a lot younger than we were now. The world was in a different place when we started making the original, the debut record, which was 2000. We started in 2011 with these songs. We recorded, it came out in 2014, and a lot has changed in that time. The fact that even just what we've personally experienced in our lives, along with the changing environment of going through a global pandemic and everything with having crazy political system would make us-- we wanted to have a more grownup sound and more mature sound in a way, and also reflect the things that we are listening to [unintelligible 00:04:48] and are always constantly changing and evolving with music taste.

We always discover things and send it to each other, and we're like, "Oh, you have to listen to this. It's incredible." It's a lot of this stuff that we were listening to during the Pandemic when we were writing this was a lot of lo-fi minimalist, early '80s electronic music, so this was something that we haven't ever gone into. Having mellotron and drum machine on songs. We've always strictly been a guitar-based rock and roll band.

This was a new thing that we wanted to try, and it was fun and exciting and it's still scary when we play it live now, but we love it. [laughs]

Kate Hinds: I want to play some music. Let's listen to the album's opening track. It's titled On the Road, which The Fader magazine recently called "One of the songs you need in your life."That's a really nice compliment. What did that mean. When I heard it, I was like, "This is an absolute banger." Rahill, you wrote it. I think you co-wrote it with someone. What was the inspiration behind the song and why open the album with it?

Rahill Jamalifard: I think we wanted to open the album with it because it's like when you hear it, there's a car starting, so it's getting us ready for this trip we're about to take you on. I come from the old-school belief system of listening to a long-playing record as a full record. We thought it would be a great introduction basically to start the journey. The song I thought was so important and I had written it years before, but it never really got to see real time.

Lenny always loved it, and we decided to do this, as she mentioned, more electronic, really synth-heavy rendition of it. It's pretty playful, which I think a lot of our songs are, but it's also driving and I think those are two key themes throughout the album. A really good place to start.

Kate Hinds: Well, let's listen. This is the Habibi song On the Road.

[Music - Habibi: On the Road]

Kate Hinds: Rahill, I think we're getting a little bit of your origin story in those last lyrics. I come from a family of five. My daddy came here in 1979. Talk a little bit about the song.

Rahill Jamalifard: Yes, that is just basically-- I feel like I've always been on the defense being a first-generation Iranian. It doesn't sit really well with a lot of Americans outside of New York. We've had a tumultuous history. It's continuing right now. I've always felt like this defensive pride that is abrasive because sometimes it's needed to be, and sometimes it's not, sometimes it's very indirect. This was a song because it had that punk kind of driving feeling that it was, I'm going to own this and I'm going to proudly say this and repeat it twice because it's a pronounced thing, my identity, and it matters to me. It's always with me, and that's just like this is one example of it being pretty direct, I guess.

Kate Hinds: 1979, the year your dad came over is also the year of the Islamic Revolution. How did that event shape your life and your music?

Rahill Jamalifard: Well, that event--

Kate Hinds: Answer in 30 seconds. No, I'm only joking.

Rahill Jamalifard: No, no, don't worry. I won't take you down the chapters, but that event basically is the reason why I'm alive. [chuckles] My parents both left Iran then, because at the time, the institutions had shut down and they were both students, so they both wanted to continue pursuing their education. My mom first went to France, but disliked it. She said Paris was really racist and decided Michigan, where a brother of hers had moved at the same time as her was a better place. My parents met through that brother of hers, my uncle, and it basically is how I came into fruition. My parents had that not happen, my dad would be somewhere in Shiraz and my mom's somewhere in Isfahan or who knows, but I'm part of a very large diaspora of Iranians who left around that time.

Kate Hinds: Moved to Michigan, which has a sizable Middle Eastern population.

Rahill Jamalifard: Yes. I have a more unique version of assimilation because we didn't have a huge Iranian community, but there was a very large Arab community which actually Lenny was a part of. The foundation, Habibi is an Arabic word that's universal. Iranians use it too. She had Arab friends because she lived just inside Detroit or outside of Dearborn, the place that has the most Arabs outside of a Arab country.

For me, because my parents are Muslim, I was raised Muslim. I still culturally identify. My community largely was made up of Arabs. It was unique because, in places like California and New York, there's a bigger Iranian population. There was five families, six families that we were very close to. We remain close to, but also a much broader Muslim community, which was made up of a lot of Arabs.

Kate Hinds: You said Habibi it's not a Farsi word, but it's universal. Tell our listeners what it means.

Rahill Jamalifard: Lenny. [chuckles]

Lenny Lynch: Oh, it means my love. It means my sweet. Like what Rahill said, a lot of my friends that went to my church growing up, even every picnic had the best food ever. They were Syrian, Lebanese and a lot of my best friends still are, but then when I went to Egypt, the first time I ever left the United States, and it's this word that I think means something so special and sweet, Habibi or Habibti. It was everywhere. I think we went to Bali, luckily we had a show there for some reason, and it was everywhere over there in Indonesia. It was just on shirts and everything, and I love how it's a word that crosses over, it crosses boundaries because it just means something very sweet.

Kate Hinds: You both met in Michigan, how did you meet and how did you decide to form a band?

Rahill Jamalifard: Oh, we actually didn't meet. I wish that was the story we met in Michigan, but [chuckles] we met in New York and we actually met through a touring mutual friend. We were like ships in the night in Michigan. She left and then I moved to Detroit and then I left, and then we met there, but we had all the same friends because we were part of the same music community.

Kate Hinds: Ah, I see.

Rahill Jamalifard: Yes. We met in New York at a show that I had booked for this mutual old friend of both of ours, and it was love at first sight for me. I can't speak for Lenny, but I do know she was-- [chuckles] we joke and say she was going through a breakup and I was her rebound.

[laughter]

It was really like, of course of all places of two bandmates find each other at a show. It was really important and special to me to meet somebody who's from Michigan, understands my background, and then also we had so much music in common. It just was this natural magnetic meeting that just basically-- Lenny had this long history of playing in cool punk bands in Detroit.

I always went to shows, but never really thought. I was like, "That was my--" I never played music growing up, so I never saw myself as being able to, but because I felt really comfortable with Lenny and she was so encouraging, it just naturally became like, "Oh, we should write songs together." You like to write Rahill, and I love she had all these songs and melodies, and so it just became this very fast tracking of friendship and music making, I guess.

Kate Hinds: Before we get into-- Oh, sorry. Lenny, go. Sorry.

Lenny Lynch: Oh, no, I just wanted to add to another album I was obsessed with or an artist was Kourosh Yaghmaei which was this Persian artist that Rahill grew up with. That was another thing that really bonded us, where we're excited to know each other and work on music together.

Kate Hinds: Before we play more music from Dream Machine. I wanted to play something from your last album Anywhere But Here so listeners can get a sense of how your sound has evolved a little bit. Let's listen to a song from that album called Angel Eyes.

[MUSIC - Habibi: Angel Eyes]

Kate Hinds: That's both delightful but also slightly ominous. There's something about the guitar that gives it this undercurrent of tension. At least I find it that way. What were you going for with that song?

Lenny Lynch: Oh, sorry. I didn't know if you with Rahill, but what you just said that's-- I think that is-- I wish we were always like, that's pretty much what we're going for all the time. Delightful, but ominous.

[laughter]

Rahill Jamalifard: I think we like bright, but Lenny and I like [unintelligible 00:16:35] who she just like mentioned, it's the exact I would say, same feeling where it's a little haunting, but it's really beautiful and it pulls you in. I think that that was probably both of our favorite song off of that record. I wrote it about Lee Van Cleef from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[laughter]

Which it was a funny talking point at shows because sometimes we have all-ages shows and to mention that that movie sometimes fell on deaf ears.

Kate Hinds: This one's for your grandparents' kids. What is the songwriting process like as a band? Rahill, I'll start with you on that. Does one person primarily write songs? Is it collaborative?

Rahill Jamalifard: I think it's always been formulaic. For Lenny and I is that we share as soon as a thought enters our brain. The nucleus will be from one of us, and then it just expands, and it's whether it starts with a vocal melody alone or it starts with a guitar line. For me, my process, if it's a song that I'm working on, it just starts with a vocal melody most of the time, and if I get the time to before excitingly sharing it with her, I will try and write just very root notes just on a keyboard, so for some accompaniment or something.

I think that's the beauty of our relationship is that we can really right away understand the direction of each other, how small it is or just we see the vision and it just comes into fruition through whatever. Through that bond or something. I can let Lenny expand on it.

Lenny Lynch: I think we both will be like, "What are we trying to do with this song? This sounds--" When Rahill said, for instance, I'll use Angel Eyes as an example, she was like, "Oh, I love the Angel Eyes from Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I'm going to try and make that into more of like have a surf Western style guitar but with also certain haunting Middle Eastern aspects." Because that's what we always do anyway. It's more fun that way for me to play. [chuckles]

Kate Hinds: Let's play a song that you co-wrote with Rahill titled, Do You Want Me Now off your forthcoming album Dream Machine? Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Habibi: Do You Want Me Now]

Kate Hinds: That was the song Do You Want Me Now by the Brooklyn-based band Habibi. I have been speaking with their co-founders, Rahill Jamalifard and Lenny Lynch. I'm so thrilled that you were able to join us. Thank you so very much.

Rahill Jamalifard: Thank you for having us. It's been a pleasure.

Kate Hinds: Again--

Lenny Lynch: It's been so fun. Thank you.

Kate Hinds: -- Dream Machine comes out Friday. I want to go out on another one of your songs titled My Moon.

[MUSIC - Habibi: My Moon]

Kate Hinds: That's All Of It. I'm Kate Hinds, in for Alison Stewart. We will have more tomorrow. Actor William Jackson Harper stops by to talk about his Tony-nominated performance as Astrov, the young, existentially bored doctor in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, plus a new camping cookbook with food tips. That's All Of It.

[MUSIC - Habibi: My Moon]

[00:21:58] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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