A Visionary Songwriter Delivers Poetically Vulnerable Lyrics
In a Desire To Seek Real Change in This World.
By Aiyah Sibay
MARSEILLE—
A mixture of Arabic and French pours through the alleyways of the city, landing in a lyrical pool of longing by the harbor, where we’ve come at the end of this long summer day. The sea eases into a calm tapping; some boats return, some depart. It is the kind of day that asks us to remember. Voices native to us speak of life, of ordinary things.
Beside this, a guitar lifts above the silhouette of bodies gathered by the water. We are here, and not. As honest music does, it holds us long enough for us to return, to leave, to be where we cannot –
“Thought we could change their greedy ways
Make it a better place…
Far from home my daddy wrote me a letter
‘Where’s our son? We’re both growing older.’”
–Kris Piña, “who have i become”
From the country he once came to in refuge from the war in Lebanon, Kris Piña shares his remarkable journey of leaving home with a desire to deliver meaningful change into this world. As a young boy, Piña had already come to know the price of war: how it severs and separates with a possessive, indiscriminate hand. How delicate one’s childhood becomes at the threshold of a moment that could change everything.
He lived a story that would later shape his musical direction, where home folded into a memory – where language became political and school expanded into a space that held much of the world’s misunderstandings. These experiences are at the heart of his debut EP, who have I become, to be released on October 17, featuring a collection of new music that, in the artist’s words, “vulnerably shares feelings of survivor’s guilt, panic attacks, humility, and perspective on life’s purpose.”
Piña would eventually return to Lebanon with his father. By then, so much had changed. War, when it goes, leaves behind its scent in the air. It demands to be remembered, to reappear in the ordinary. He shares how different it felt returning to school in Lebanon, how he carried a deeper understanding of life.. Not long
afterwards, he would leave Lebanon again, this time, of his own will, and in pursuit of what war had gave him: a yearning to participate in the antonym of all that had delivered him far from home.
Later, Piña would face the inevitable question of whether this desire was worth the sacrifice. Perhaps it’s the most honest confession an artist could make: to say he began with a dream, that he was lucky enough to test it, to live through the messy work of seeing it through, and finally, to stand still, to look back and question it with honesty, no matter the pain. More often than not, it lands us in a place of deep uncertainty. And from this space of not knowing, art arrives. For Piña, it came through in music, in soul-sung verses that allowed him to explore his doubts, and his poetic search for what remains unanswered – and much remains so.
***
We walk through Marseille, and the yellow cry of many desires mixing by its shore. A place of contradictions, where every beauty is mirrored in the waters of passing gazes, bearing so much that is not beautiful. Where leaving home is a choice, and not. Where hope is a lover that comes and goes, and the will to change sometimes lands in a song, sometimes in the verse-less gaps of despair.
In the uncertainty of home, music becomes a territory that holds the memory, and the feelings delivered through it. From this long road, with his voice, his guitar, his desire to soften the conflicts of this world, Piña pairs his music with a visual language that follows the authenticity of the lyrics. Using storytelling and the community of his concerts, he gathers us in his truth, and we become softer and safer in the proximity.
To listen to Piña’s music is to experience each song as a room, harboring a story, inviting us to touch that vulnerable space within us that has lived through this too. With liberating honesty, he shares the decisions he’s made in his life, and the desire to understand those decisions. Gathering material from his dreams and lived experience, he writes out his stories when they come, and when it is time, one by one, they find their way into verses composed with the authenticity of an artist seeking what matters.
***
Mid-performance, Piña pauses the concert to invite his audience to turn to each other and share something they wouldn’t normally share in meeting someone for the first time. Perhaps it is much simpler after all; maybe it is in these moments that lasting change spreads. In the vulnerability of an artist opening himself before a crowd, life attempts to echo that same degree of honesty. And in this space, conflict melts into something far less impossible.
With this deep calling that led him far from home, Piña stands by the same sea that borders the place he left. He faces the passing crowd, lifts his guitar and sings those verses birthed from a dream that led him around the world and landed him in the dusk of a country that began this story.
“What am I doing in this strange country
Walking alone on this street?
Left home in a rush
To save the world.”
@krispinamusic
Aiyah Sibay
- Aiyah Sibay
