The original duo

This song came about as a result of a four way collaboration between myself, Poet Hakimi "Mike" Mokhtar of Algeria, Maslennikova "Massenia" Ksenia of Belarus and the Wave Mechanic who lives I don't even know where.

Mike got in touch with me on Insta and asked if I'd put words to his lyric "the brave man" about the loneliness and estrangement of his being an atheist in Algeria, an extremely religious society. I felt the poem was cool, though a little on the nose. I made a video singing something to it and called it a day. But Mike felt like I could do more, and he pushed me gently every now and then until finally I decided to sit down and make a go of it.

A third artist

At this same time I was feeling frustrated with how my music career has failed to launch over the years, and the amount of money I would spend on my tracks to get them right, and I was still obscure of the obscure. So I decided to just DIY as best as I could by myself and hope I could pull off a decent song without engineers and instrumentalists. I wrote and performed all the parts & beats and half mixed, then I passed the mix on to my mastering compadre, the wave mechanic... We have started to do a thing where we half skip the mix stage, I create stems and he master/mixes them in this very unorthodox and effective way. This was an early phase experiment on that level. Mastering has evolved to be an incredible tool if given the width of purpose.

A fourth artist

A teenage painter from Belarus named Maslennikova "Massenia" Ksenia, created this image for an earlier song I created. At the time I felt the painting was dispossessing of the character, as I have felt so dispossessed over time, so I didn't use it for that other song... But once I finished The Brave Man, I looked back on her painting and saw immediately how perfect it was. it was absolutely fitting for our character of the brave man. She made a sketch and then later a complete painting. But even though her painting is amazing and one day I'll release it on something, the sketch really captured the song perfectly.

I should also say I didn't faithfully use Mike's lyrics. The poem worked as a poem but it needed shaping for song form and repetition, so I created a hooky part about "go go obey, you better believe and you must pray" because I felt he was being too subtle in some ways (what the message of the song really is) and yet too on the nose about the tone of the mood (a bit much about the self and boo hoo me) so I just tweaked it enough so we get what our character is going through, and so now we can feel for them, both in the strength but also the disempowerment and fragmentation represented by Massenia's artwork.