Fadi
A bonus track from Sweden
I met Fadi at his apartment in Stockholm. He served strong black coffee and Coca-Cola and we sat in his living room as he talked about his childhood in Syria.
He’s from Suwayda, a city in the south of the country. It was a liberal place in many ways, where every house had musicians and poets, and he remembers walking down the streets at night, listening to music stream out the front doors of his neighbors’ homes, a place where families pinched pennies where possible in order to teach their children music. By six he was squirreling away his own pocket money to buy bootleg cassette tapes of Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. His grandfather, a sheikh, made wine in the basement of a centuries-old Roman church.
He left Syria in 2014 as the war ripped the country from the inside out. He made his way to Sweden and while waiting for asylum bought a broken oud, took it apart, and tuned it back together. Within weeks, a Swedish band heard him play and asked him to join.
The first home he lived in after receiving asylum was a massive thirteen-room house in a forest near Linköping. The owner warned him of ghosts, but Fadi told him that ghosts were better than humans.
When the electricity went out for a month, he played by candlelight every night. He says it was the most balanced he has ever been.