From Sfax
to Pennsylvania.

Mourad Youssef Bouajaja is a Tunisian-American songwriter and producer. He was born in Sfax, Tunisia — a coastal city that has spent a thousand years being a doorway between continents — and he writes from the inside of that inheritance.

The music is what you might expect from someone who grew up between two seas: in three or four languages at once, never quite settled in one tradition, and always with a thread back to المالوف — Malouf, the Andalusi-North African classical tradition that arrived in Tunisia after the fall of Granada and stayed there for five centuries. The records borrow from it, talk back to it, leave it alone for a song or two, then return.

He left for the United States as a young man and has been based in Pennsylvania since. The first records, released through MYB Studio, are about that distance — not the dramatic kind, but the everyday kind: the call back home that gets harder to make, the language that softens at the edges, the friends who become photographs. Some songs are in English. Some are in Tunisian Arabic. A few are in both, in the same verse, the way the inside of his head actually works.

The work

The first full-length, Gharib (غريب), is an album about distance. The Arabic word means “stranger,” “foreigner,” or “far” depending on how you place it — and that ambiguity is the whole record. Recorded and produced primarily at home, mixed and mastered with a deliberate slowness, it's not designed for the playlist economy. It's designed for the people who still listen to albums.

Talk to me (كلّمني) is a single about asking to be heard, sung in two languages because that's how the question lives. Junto a mi amada (بحذا حبيبتي) is an interpretation of an Andalusi-Malouf piece in the public domain — older than the country, older than the language — translated into something personal in Spanish, Arabic, and the spaces between.

The other work

Mourad also runs MYB Studio, a boutique recording and production house that does mastering, mixing, video editing, and the administrative side of releasing music for a small number of artists each year. The studio is its own thing, with its own site, its own voice. This site is the artist; that one is the room.

He's also writing a book: Tell The Truth Even If It's Bitter / The Shrine and the Industry, about inheriting a tradition you didn't ask for and what happens when you carry it into a place that doesn't recognize it. More on that when there's more to say.

The thread

If there's a single line through everything — the records, the studio, the book — it is this: that something can be slow, careful, and rooted, and still arrive on time.

— M.