Solstice

Album: Indigo (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • The singer-songwriter-composer Dana Al Fardan has an unusual and inspiring backstory. She's from Qatar, a small country in the Middle East with a history of male guardianship that prevented many women from pursuing careers in music. A symphonic musician, she released her first album, Paint, in 2013, and in 2018 became Cultural Ambassador of the Qatari Philharmonic Orchestra. If you've flown Qatar Airways, you've heard her music: it's played when passengers come on board.

    In 2022 she released Indigo, with songs performed by the orchestra. "Solstice," a track from the album, she says "represents the space we find within that allows our light to shine through. It's the light that liberates the infinite glow we all hold, 'the light that freed the sun.'"
  • The Indigo album carries a concept of how color affects our emotions. It's based on the book Theory of Colours, first published in 1810 by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Each song on the album is designed to convey a different mood, just as various colors do in the visual spectrum.
  • The song was arranged by the Syrian violinist MAias Al Yamani and produced by the London-based Nico Dalla Vecchia, known as SINK.
  • The music video is intentionally abstract, showing Dana Al Fardan and members of the orchestra performing the song with overlays of color and other distortions. Each single from the album comes with this kind of visual representation, which is designed to give space for personal interpretation. It was directed by Ramy Dance at Common People Films in London.

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