I’ve always felt like music helped me describe emotions that are difficult to express in words. Melancholy is the one feeling that I love to communicate through music. Words make it hard to express different sides of an emotion, but music can convey ambivalence.

Melding music and journalism into a new kind of storytelling felt natural and is what attracted and excited me to work on this project. In music, as in journalism, our words and sounds illustrate a specific topic, so combining the two makes the message even stronger.

My song, “Fractal Memories,” is about the strength of the movement of the tides. I lived my childhood in a small town in the south of France, near the sea. I spent a lot of time contemplating the tide going back and forth. There is something so powerful, yet so relaxing about it. Though it’s not a solid form, the flow of water can destroy a whole city. It’s fascinating!

For “Song of the Siren,” I wanted to capture the feeling of floating underwater combined with the warm feeling of sirens singing, hypnotized and going slowly deeper and deeper. I feel like it represents society and the influx of information from media sources today. We are just listening to them singing the same news on and on and on, and we’re not paying attention anymore.

I hope my music will inspire people to feel and to connect with the issues discussed in the book.

Khamsin