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Ben Fisher // Does the Land Remember Me?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has rarely been addressed in American music. But on Ben Fisher’s latest release, the Damien Jurado-produced Does the Land Remember Me?, the Seattle-based folk artist—who spent three years living in Israel—dives headfirst into an entire concept album on the subject, a bloodcurdling and somber meditation that humanizes those on both sides of the divide. Fisher’s metaphorical and literal interpretations are wreathed together in a binding, barbed-wire circle as he tackles a complex and heavy narrative. His skill as a songwriter and storyteller is a big part of what drew the interest of producer Jurado, and it has landed him gigs over the years on bills with groundbreaking artists such as Courtney Marie Andrews, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Animal Collective, The Head and the Heart, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and countless others.
His voice equal parts frayed and sinewy, Fisher spurns complacency with tremendous urgency on Does the Land Remember Me?, his second full-length. He takes great care in his storytelling, especially on standout track “1948,” an evocative duet with Noah Gundersen that features Fisher singing from the perspective of a Jewish child and Gundersen from the perspective of an Arab child at the outset of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, known by Israelis as the War of Independence and in Palestinian society as the Nakba (catastrophe). “Are you scared of the men, Papa / They don’t want us here / Are you scared of the men, Papa / They’ve been here for years / Are you scared all of this will go,” Fisher sings over a plaintive fingerpicked guitar.
Fisher acts primarily as the record’s narrator, drawing from the three years he spent living in “No Man’s Land,” smack between predominantly Arab East and predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem. But the roots of the album date back to a 2014 excursion to Tokyo. It was there that Does the Land Remember Me?’s opening track “The Shell Lottery”—a musical history lesson on the 1909 founding of Tel Aviv—hit Fisher like a lightning bolt. “I started thinking about the scope of Sufjan Stevens’ records Illinois and Michigan,” he says. “It dawned on me that there was something to this song, and that there could be more.”
Does the Land Remember Me?— scheduled for a September 7 release—is a bleak but honest portrait of the Israeli and Palestinian people, who have been locked in a cycle of violence for the better part of the last century. “One of the biggest issues is that people are no longer interested in what happens there,” Fisher says. “It’s gone on for so long, the peace process is so gridlocked and there have been so many people killed. The world has become numb to it.”
As he searches for the right words, Fisher scours his conscience in search of hope—a hope that people will be moved and inspired to action through the record. “Passivity is much worse than taking a stand, even if I don’t particularly agree with that stand,” he says. “Young Americans, in particular, need to help moderate America’s influence on Israel.”
In an attempt to shed further light on the conflict, Fisher doesn’t shy away from the sheer brutality experienced by the Middle East and its people.“They Must Have Been So Scared” is one of the album’s glistening gems, but it’s also the most grim and heart-wrenching. In three verses, the ballad peels back the layers of three tragic stories. “The summer of 2014 was a particularly bloody and terrible time in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” Fisher says. Verse one of the song unspools the tale of a Palestinian family in Gaza who are killed by an Israeli airstrike; verse two exposes the kidnap and murder of three Israeli boys by Palestinian terrorists; and verse three tells the narrative of a Palestinian boy burned alive by a group of Jewish terrorists. Fisher later frames the hook, “They must have been so scared / Must have felt death chill the air / How could you leave them there?” around his atheist beliefs, offering up a bitter prayer “to a god I don’t believe in for all these insane deaths that happened that summer,” he says with a disarming matter-of-factness.
It’s not all conflict songs though; the second half of the record sees Fisher singing about Israeli folk heroes like astronaut Ilan Ramon and singer-songwriter Meir Ariel. “For Petr and Ilan” tells the story of Ramon’s doomed trip into space aboard the Columbia. He took with him copies of a drawing done by a young Czechoslovak boy named Petr Ginz, who was murdered in Auschwitz. With a style and lyrical form that pays homage to the American folk canon, Fisher sings, “The astronaut wore a flag patch on his arm / The little boy wore a yellow star / Got taken away in a cattle car / The astronaut wore a flag patch on his arm”
Born to a bacon-eating Jewish family and eventually majoring in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington, Fisher’s sudden obsession with Israel led him to leave his family for the first time, traversing thousands of miles across oceans and time zones. “It got to the point where I was baking pita and reading [Israeli newspaper] Haaretz in the mornings,” he says. “It’s much easier to be obsessed with something when you’re surrounded by it.” Not long after graduating from college, he packed up his entire life and moved to the ancient city, where spent his time bartending, and writing, reporting and traveling for The Jerusalem Post.
?In “Brave New World,” one of the few songs drawing on Fisher’s personal experiences, he sings about the foreignness of the Holy City: “Everyone I’ve ever known lives far across a sea / My brave new world can be old and cold but you struck a chord in me.”
His return to the U.S. in the summer of 2017 propelled him to finish Does the Land Remember Me?, the album spilling forth with an elusive humanity too often mangled by the evening news and the purgatorial bickering of social-media feeds. The title song, a melodic piano-anchored affair, presents the story of a Palestinian expelled from his home during the 1948 war. Minutes later, on the wretchedly radiant “Yallah to Abdullah,” Fisher peers through the eyes of an Israeli soldier during the same war, underscoring the album’s goals of humanity and understanding.
He later etches an equally affecting moment with “Abraham’s Song,” the track with the shortest run-time on the record but perhaps the most involved backstory. “This was the hardest song for me to write because I disagree so wholeheartedly with their mindset and political agenda,” says Fisher about writing from the perspective of a Jewish settler in the West Bank. “I wanted to portray this person in a sympathetic, human light,” he continues. “I tried to paint the narrative of the settler movement, which started as an arguably innocent thing, and evolved into something sinister, ugly, dangerous and evil.”
Fisher strikes a fitting balance between emotion and reality on Does the Land Remember Me?. By allowing himself to inhabit these real-life characters, he makes possible a deeper understanding of the dire state of this tiny strip of land and its people. And his experiences only seem to aid his desire for mercy, eerily feeding into each stark moment with enthralling insight. Does the Land Remember Me? is a career-making record, timely and crucial.
“As he searches for the right words, Fisher scours his conscience in search of hope—a hope that people will be moved and inspired to action through the record.” – No Depression