Been hearing this a lot and honestly only haven’t posted it here because I was assuming it already had been posted a bunch when it first came out.

from the artist, in the comments:

Gaza is Calling is about my first experience with heartbreak in friendship. I was 11 when I met this boy from Gaza. We were inseparable. With him I shared one of the deepest loves I’ve ever known, he grew up alongside me in a housing project in Toronto. And not even this love was a match for the violence we were up against; the one in our new home, the one that followed him from Gaza like a cold wind. In the end it was all the bloodshed between us that didn’t allow us to see each other without tears appearing, and one of the last notes he sent to me was about how we would continue on in another life.

The string sample is the Arabian nostalgia that we share, the autotuned Arabic I sing is the balance we tried to reach being boys of cultural empires in a small hood, and the Oud is the instrument of our homelands, Sudan and Palestine.