Few artists bridge as many worlds as the renowned singer and composer Defne Sahin, who effortlessly merges poetry and music, language and song, as well as different places and emotions. With "Hope," the Berlin-born artist of Turkish origin, continues to develop her cosmopolitan sound drawing from her experience of living between New York, Berlin, and Istanbul. Inspired by the poems of Dickinson, “Hope” is an exceptional album which offers an intimate look into the highs and lows of life. It offers deep insights into human existence in all its complexity.
Over the course of two years, Sahin dedicated herself to shaping a fresh and personal sound for the album. Initially, in the isolation imposed by the pandemic, where she came to empathize with how Dickinson created her own works withdrawn from society. Later, she recorded the ten captivating pieces of the album with her band members Johannes von Ballestrem, Keisuke Matsuno, Simon Jermyn, and Martin Krümmling. The album creates a unique genre-bending musical landscape in which the lyrics and melodies shape the compositions – ultimately, pushing and expanding Sahin's musical identity, which is rooted in jazz, pop and Turkish music.
Poetry has always played a key role in the musician's compositions: on her debut album "Yasamak" (2011), she set the poetry of Turkish dissident Nâzim Hikmet to music, while on her album "Unravel" (2016), she included poems by William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson in addition to her own lyrics. Sahin is no stranger to performing on big stages such as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Jazzfest Berlin, and the Istanbul Jazz Festival. In her numerous collaborations with, amongst others, Guillermo Klein, Anthony Braxton, Jay Clayton, and Shai Maestro, she gracefully navigates varied musical styles, while each of her albums opens up a new sonic world.
With "Hope", Sahin not only set her poems to music, but also wrote lyrics that reflect Dickinson's poetry of life and death, love and longing, fear and hope. Dickinson’s life story and writing inspired Sahin to create a dialogue between the two artists on the album. Sahin is fascinated by Dickinson's dedication to writing even though only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime. Due to her own experiences of discrimination, Sahin also identifies with the hurdles Dickinson had to overcome as a woman in the 19th century. She characterizes her creative process with Dickinson's works as an "imaginary collaboration," drawing personal parallels with Dickinson's timeless themes of loneliness, hope, and love, and weaving these threads into a modern and lyrical song cycle. Sahin worked on the compositions with her mentor, the multiple Grammy-nominated singer and composer Becca Stevens, who, along with Joni Mitchell and Laura Mvula, also served as a major source of inspiration for the album.
"Hope is the thing with feathers," a well-known poem by Dickinson, is set in a unique musical context – embedded in recurring loops and closely intertwined harmonies, Sahin's soulful singing beautifully intertwines the poem with her musical world. Through Sahin's eclectic and warm vocals, Dickinson's poems are cast in a new light, awakened and resonant. In "Moyra's Light," a fragile ballad for piano and voice, the musician processes complex experiences of loss and death - much like Dickinson, this allows her to engage with collective emotions from a personal perspective. In other pieces like "Let go," Sahin addresses the simultaneous but contradictory desires for freedom and closeness.
The album concludes with "Blessing from a Lioness," which comes as a clear call to not give up on hope but to hold onto one's dreams, and to listen to one's inner self. Therefore, the album symbolizes more than just hope. As an odyssey through universal phenomena such as fear, courage, and longing, "Hope" creates an incomparable fusion of poetry and music that embraces its listeners like a soundtrack to life.
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