Waysides

While Bedouine’s 2017 self-titled debut delighted with mostly guitar and vocals, her third album, Waysides, follows in the footsteps of 2019’s Bird Songs of a Killjoy, complementing Azniv Korkejian’s angelic vocals with instrumentals that transport listeners into their own folky fairytale. “It started as a really simple endeavor,” Korkejian tells Apple Music about producing the flourishes you hear throughout the album’s 10 songs. “I just assumed it would be guitar/vocals, but I just had so much time. Then my partner [Gus Seyffert], who was just going to mix them, encouraged me to stick with the productions and let them develop. They became a lot more complex than I initially intended them to be.” Waysides is a collection of songs Korkejian has written over the years that may have remained castoffs had a pandemic not given her the time and space to revisit them. “I never would’ve had time to sift through all these old demos and be thoughtful about where they should live,” she says. “I had a folder of songs I thought I should consider for the next record, then I noticed it was growing so much that it could become its own record.” Read along as Korkejian takes us through each of her songs, track by track.
“The Solitude” “It’s funny, this one started as just songwriting practice. I’d gone through different phases where I sit down and I give myself a prompt, or I study a song and write an homage to it. In this case, I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s ‘My Old Man,’ and there’s a lyric that she uses: ‘The bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.’ That really stuck with me because it was a way to describe somebody’s absence that I’ve never heard before. I wanted to write a song that flexed that. I wasn’t even on board at first, but when we really opened it up, I ended up really happy with it.”
“It Wasn’t Me” “This one’s really special because it reminds me of a time when I was starting to get comfortable with making bedroom demos, and it’s about 15 years old. I would lock myself in my room for hours, time would fly by, and at the end of it, I had captured this feeling—whatever I was feeling. That was the most rewarding thing. That’s kind of what the song represents to me. More than the content of the song, it reminds me of how it was made and the magic that can happen when you’re alone long enough to really flesh out an idea.”
“I Don’t Need the Light” “This is summertime [during lockdown], and I was really struggling with depression. When I wrote the song, I felt like I was turning a corner by just accepting it and giving into the sadness, but in a cozy way. I was trying to take care of myself, like you do when you have a cold and settle into it and wear it like a blanket. It felt a lot better than trying to fight it. That’s what the song is about—settling into that feeling.”
“Easy” “‘Easy’ was a really fun song to write. It’s a really simple form and there’s a lot of fun, little misleading lyrical turns. It’s simple, but it’s about a relationship that’s challenging but really meaningful and worth the trouble of finding its stride.”
“This Machine” “This song represents a coming-of-age moment to me. I realized that the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything. As comfortable as I was at the time, I felt like if I stayed where I was, I would regret it. Moving on and starting over later in life, an internal conflict between loving someone and feeling comfortable and honoring the pull towards something different.”
“The Wave” “I was really struggling with [the loss of a friend] and her absence. I wrote the song in remembrance of her and also as a reminder to myself to feel my feelings, because I was having a hard time processing it. I still have a hard time processing it. This was a reminder to allow myself to grieve and try to understand how I was feeling in response to it. It’s a reminder of the practice of sitting with your feelings.”
“You Never Leave Me” “This is a really sentimental song for me. Gus and I recorded it in this desert cabin that we rented for a night, on a TASCAM 388, and it was this magical recording that encapsulates that memory. My voice changed so much [since that recording] that I redid the vocal and guitar, and then I massaged the old tracks onto the new ones. It’s a lot of maneuvering and finagling, but that’s kind of the spirit of this album, which is why it feels so dear to me already. It has this DIY spirit, even though it might not come across sonically, but that’s what the process felt like.”
“Sonnet 104” “Gus and I wrote this one together. We were asked to write a song based on a Shakespeare sonnet, to perform at the Shakespeare theater in Laurel Canyon, and we came up with this. I love these parameters. They can be really liberating when you have a starting point, and it just spilled out of us.”
“Forever Everette” “Basically, I was having a rude awakening when I realized the person that it was about, that I felt so comfortable and so safe with, couldn’t keep being that person. I was moving on from sadness to frustration, which is not a feeling I capture a lot in my songs. That was really the goal, to capture that feeling.”
“Songbird” “Part of the reason this whole album came to life is because I had this little setup in my music room to start recording covers. ‘Songbird’ was one of them, and it made sense to me to include it. Waysides is so much about celebrating the songwriting process, rather than hiding it away, and this felt like an expression of that. Maybe it’s a little meta because of the title and because it ties in my last record title, Bird Songs of a Killjoy. It all really makes sense to me; it emotionally feels like it belongs to that same world.”