Words by Allysha Joy // photograph by Daniel Adhami
Silk is beautiful, love is beautiful — but both have the potential to be embroidered with pain. And this is my experience, this is my expression, as I am coming to understand that this word ‘love’ has so often been co opted and used to describe something that it is not. At this moment and through great deep diving, I am redefining this word with my new album The Making of Silk. I am reaching the very edges of love with great passion and poeticism and realising for the first time in my life that like damn .. love, like actual love is fucking beautiful.
The Making of Silk, my third solo album and my most personal work to date, is a deep dive into compassion, yearning romance, great pain and defiance – felt in both the lyrical message and the process of making this music as a female producer. Did you know that less than 5% of music is produced by non-men? So you’re damn right I produced this music myself! And at the same time, I wanna stagger a guess to say that almost every non-male on this earth experiences sexual-abuse of some kind within their lifetime. Even worse in my opinion and experience if that abuse was packaged up as “love”, which it so often is, with 25% of non-men experiencing abuse at the hands of a partner within their lifetime. Pretty brutal introduction to the music, but it’s the truth .. and for me as an artist it is all connected. This album is about reclaiming my voice, my power, my space, my music and redefining this word ‘love’.
Inspired by greatness, it’s reaching for the kind of love that bell hooks writes about, that lives in the poetry of Mary Oliver, Hafiz or the passionate dreaming of a Koryusai painting. It’s about a love that is compassionate, that’s wild, that lives in open conversation, deep listening, the front lines of social movements, abolitionism and would never seek to stifle the light in you. It’s about accepting our aloneness and simultaneously witnessing our connectivity. It’s about feeling into the impermanence of all things and still forever wanting to prove it wrong, to say yes I understand that all things change, all things end, hurt exists, but I will love regardless. I will strive for an ethic of love in justice, searching to find a way to move with integrity always, with an endless generosity of my spirit. I will learn to live in this way. I will learn to love.
nothing to prove
I admit I need love, in all these myriad ways and I have nothing to prove in trying to appear to be strong, to hold it back, to say that I need you. I surrender to the act of love, that it will change me and that I need you in the same breath knowing that I am whole without you.
dropping keys
Inspired by the Hafiz Poem of the same name, these words call for us all to continue to find the keys that can unlock us from our own cages and pass on the wisdom for others to do the same. It’s about compassion, a love in our understanding of the collective pain and releasing.
reset : ___ ft. annalisa fernandez
“I think that love is more than just a feeling, it’s an action, it’s an expression of how we view the world and how we view others in our lives .. and the way that we love each other, really shows who we are as people”
raise up
Love is uncomfortable, it requires us to face ourselves and be honest. And all that inner work and unwinding brings us closer to accepting ourselves. And through that inward journey, allowing us to accept others.
hold on
The true gift of love is letting you be you and me be me. Allowing your dearest ones to be who they are, to change, to grow, to leave, to pass on, to aspire to more.
silk
“love crawls in, stumbling, pulling at the curtain on its way down.” This song is about the way that love can just charge into your life unbeknownst to you and much to the dismay of all your defenses.
This love is pleasure. Inspired by Isoda Koryusai’s painting ‘Love interrupts the making of Silk’ and all the beauty captured as two lovers are lost in their romantic rapture.
___ : float ft. douniah
This kind of love that sends you all the way back home, only to be drenched in rose water, “like a hug that stops the time” over slushy drums and flowing synthesizers.
david
This track is everything to me, it is reclaiming a force within that says no when something doesn’t feel right and recognises that we collectively deserve better, to feel safe, to feel loved, to be treated well. This track is learning what love is not. And it is saying it out loud.
your touch
Love as infatuation. “I open up my arms, not to embrace you but to keep my balance” .. I don’t know who said this, but that’s what this song is about.
learning to love
Love and death, this song was written for my dearest friend and it is the journey to accepting that we really are ultimately alone in our suffering … And yet, never alone. In the impermanence of everything as all things will come and go, as we are one and nothing and all.
stay
‘Stay’ is about drawing a kind of love into your life that is wanting and willing for you to do right by you, to say yes and really mean it, to say no when you need to. “Still here I am asking you to stay”. It’s about love parting across the oceans and forever still longing.
