Serenading Truths

How many singers can say their debut album was recorded as a university music project? Palestinian singer-songwriter Maysa Daw can

- Iain Akerman

Released in June last year, the album Between City Walls, by young Palestinian singer-songwriter Maysa Daw, is a guitar-driven indie gem that refuses to pull any punches. Love under occupation, equality, the quest for freedom. It’s all there.

“It was a very different world for me,” she recalls. “I grew up in Haifa, which is a lot more chill, a lot more relaxed, and suddenly I move to Jaffa and study in Tel Aviv and everything was so intense. Everything was so new.

“It produced a lot of stuff. Love songs, break-ups songs, political songs. It also produced one of my favourite songs – Crazy. I was so frustrated when I started writing this song. I was thinking of so many things at the time and I just wrote everything down. It’s exactly the way I was feeling – the things that I was asking myself. It talks about religion, it talks about death, it talks about politics. It talks about a lot of things.”

Featuring samples of classical Arabic songs, bursts of radio static, Spanish guitar, and live voice recordings from the West Bank, the album has helped take Maysa to a much wider audience.

On top of her constant gigging, she is also set to perform in Switzerland as part of a musical collaboration called the BaselRamallah Project, and was in Chicago last month to headline Palipalooza.