The urgency in “Cowboy in a Ghost Town” is potent. A galloping beat drives the song and the whip-slap sound of the snare comes in as SAADI sings, “You are a cowboy in a ghost town/You leave a dark legacy.” When I first heard the song, from the L.A.-based singer/multi-instrumentalist’s recently released sophomore album, Birds of Paradise, I thought it was about social media. There are references to shadowbans and people living in an “alternate reality.”
“It’s about Gaza, actually,” Boshra AlSaadi says when meet up for a video call. AlSaadi has written a number of songs about Gaza, but “Cowboy in a Ghost Town,” she says, is her most overt. Listening to it again, I’m struck by the poignancy of it, from the mix of anger and helplessness that’s in AlSaadi’s voice to the protest-like chorus that rises near the song’s end to the clear references to social media. AlSaadi captures not just the horror of watching a genocide unfold on your phone, but the frustration of knowing that you can’t stay silent, even when you’re posting into a void.
“Seeing it unfold on your phone is horrific,” she says. “It’s unprecedented also.”
It’s a kind of hellscape particular to the social media age when inescapable images of starving children and bombed-out neighborhoods appear in your feed alongside influencers espousing the benefits of this week’s viral beauty fad. AlSaadi continues, “It’s very jarring to our psyche to be confronted with real violence and then full-on late stage, end stage, whatever you want to call it, capitalism, side-by-side.”
Born in Syria and raised in Pennsylvania, AlSaadi had long been based in New York, where she played with bands like TEEN and Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang. Then she went back to school, delving into science at CUNY. When the pandemic hit, she was in L.A., quarantining with producer Chris Coady while studying remotely. “Listening to Chris mixing all these records while I was doing my labs, I was like, what am I doing?” she recalls. AlSaadi decided to return to music, but science came to inform her new work.
Musically, SAADI makes synth-heavy indie pop that juxtaposes thematically-heavy lyrical content with a bright, shimmering sound. “The record does kind of deal with our innate biological nature and how we negotiate that in a digital world,” she says of Birds of Paradise.
“There are definitely a few songs where I was thinking in terms of the decisions that we make that are informed by our biological drives that don’t necessarily mesh with the structures that we live in, tribalism, the urge to procreate, violence,” AlSaadi says. Certainly, “Cowboy in a Ghost Town” is one. “Death By a Million Cuts” and “Gotcha!,” both of which address religion, are others.
We talk a lot about social media and the onslaught of horrifying news, which isn’t particularly unusual subject matter for interviews right now. All the while, I’m wondering if it is more difficult for artists to actually make work that reflects the times. Has the role of the artist changed when what people see and hear is largely dictated by the platforms?
“Absolutely,” answers AlSaadi, who is also a visual artist. (Her stained glass-style paintings appear on the cover of SAADI releases.) “Something we talk about is that art can’t be as subversive now because of said gatekeepers,” she says of her conversations with other artists.
She continues, “At the same time, it’s the artist’s responsibility to point these things out or take an unpopular stance to speak out, so I think it’s harder than ever for artists, but it’s also more important than ever to try to be subversive or to engage in unpopular conversations or risk being ostracized or shadowbanned or completely disregarded. It’s really hard. It makes me, more than ever, want to say what I want to say and not be afraid about it.”
The stifling nature of social media, though, goes beyond addressing today’s biggest issues. It’s in the way that artists are urged to use their social media accounts, be it the number of times per day that they’re supposed to post or the selfies they’re compelled to share just to appear on your feed. “It’s an additional job that you have to take on if you want a certain kind of success and if you want to participate in the metric that’s being used to measure your worth as an artist,” she says.
After going back to school, AlSaadi’s own goals for managing her music career have changed. She says, “It’s not so much fame and fortune as it is being true to myself as an artist and disseminating my music as much as I can without sacrificing my integrity or doing things that make me uncomfortable.”
And that is part of the point of Birds of Paradise. Says AlSaadi, “This record is about trying to evolve past that point of your biology dictating how you function in the world.”
Birds of Paradise by SAADI is out now. Catch SAADI live at Zebulon in Los Angeles on Friday, September 12.
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Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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