After hinting at a coming project that would bring together her many talents, Dana Hourani dropped her first single Ella Enta yesterday, along with a stunning and stylish music video. The song, which translates to “Except for You”, is sung in Lebanese, which serves to deepen the connection to Hourani’s Arab roots.
Ella Enta – which was written by Anthony Khoury of the Lebanese band Adonis – is imbued with a mournful quality. The song elegantly swells from isolated vocals and simple piano chords in a minor key to a full-bodied track complete with crescendoing violins and reverberating percussion. The lyrics take a turn for the personal as Hourani sings about “a public figure who despite her success can only find peace and inspiration in love.” Sounds familiar. She continues, “It is a rendition of my life as a modern Arab woman who questions the boundaries we draw between what is public and what is private, between life projected on social media and reality. It is about me using the universal language of music to reflect what I usually express in my photographs: the correlation between East and West that inspires my visual art. Ella Enta is my attempt to translate into Arabic the emotions that so far, I have been so accustomed to expressing in English.”
Naturally, as one of the region’s most talented and fashion-forward influencers, we loved Hourani’s look in the music video, which was aided by the eagle-eyed styling of Amine Jreissaty, who dressed her in clothes by Lado Bokuchava. Is this debut single a hint of a full album in the works? That remains to be seen, but we hope the answer is yes.
