This past Valentine’s Day, Elyanna opened the Chicago date of her first North American tour by performing the title track of her debut album, Woledto. Lured onstage by the mallet drumming of a tabla baladi and the spellbinding melody of an electroacoustic oud, the Palestinian Chilean singer-songwriter took the mic draped in angelic white. “And I ask myself after my absence,” she trilled in Arabic. “Heartbrokenly: Why did I go away/When your love was above the stars?”
To reach the stars—and last year’s Coachella stage—Elyanna has summoned sounds that cross time, space, and dialects, simultaneously ancient and ultramodern. Raised in Nazareth, with roots in Viña del Mar, Chile, she emigrated to California when she was 15. Now, at 22, her sound carries the weight of her diasporic identity, channeling the honeyed style of Nancy Ajram or a young Dalida with the playful attitude of Shakira or Rihanna. Building on self-titled EPs from 2020 and 2022, Woledto (or I Am Born) plays with Arab pop, R&B, EDM, and jazz to express the nuances of love, loss, and longing. Where her EPs balanced SWANA-inspired elements with concessions to Western pop, perhaps hoping to acclimate Anglophone audiences, Woledto sounds liberated, prioritizing audacity over assimilation.
In many ways, Woledo is part of a long oral tradition, embracing elements of Levantine folk, tribal fusion dance, and zajal (an Andalusi Arabic form of oral strophic poetry). Elyanna’s lyrics honor the influences that define her artistic lineage. “Did love strike you?/Or were you thrown with arrows?/This is just the nature of a man in love!/Come on and give me cups of it,” she sings on “Lel Ya Lel” (“Night Oh Night”), evoking the pain and romance of the ghazal poeticism of Egyptian musical icons Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez. One minute Elyanna is riffing maqam scales; the next she’s wailing, “You’ve forgotten to remember me and erased our past,” backed by a sample of her grandfather, a zajal wedding singer.
The whole album is a multigenerational effort, each friend and family member adding a layer to the collective memory. Elyanna co-wrote most tracks with her mother, Abeer; her brother Feras serves as pianist and creative director. He’s also co-credited as executive producer alongside two of Elyanna’s longtime mentors, the Lebanese Canadian R&B singer Massari and Nasri Atweh of the reggae-pop band Magic!. (It was Atweh who first encouraged Elyanna to sing in Arabic after discovering her covers of English-language pop songs.) Even her sister and stylist Tali leaves her imprint on the music, supplying the gold coins that ring out between the tabla, trumpet, and tambourines of “Ganeni” (“Make Me Crazy”).
Two of the album’s nine tracks are elaborate reinterpretations of contemporary classics. “Callin’ U (Tamally Maak)” is a bilingual mash-up of Danish hip-hop group Outlandish’s “Callin U,” itself a take on Egyptian pop singer Amr Diab’s “Tamally Maak” (“Always With You”), a 2000 guitar ballad that became an international smash, adapted into Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Kannada, Romanian, Greek, and more. With just this one track, Elyanna strikes a chord that vibrates worldwide. The lead single, “Al Sham,” emerges as an electro-raï anthem, sampling “N’ta Goudami,” by the late Algerian folk singer and “mother of raï” Cheikha Rimitti. Meanwhile, in its lyrics, Elyanna reimagines Aleppine tenor Sabah Fakhri’s 1970 composition “Khamrat El Hob” (“The Vintage of Love”). “A life without love is a stream without water,” she sings in a simmering glissando that eventually erupts like a whistling kettle. Against an original synth dabke bridge, Elyanna employs Bedouin-esque chants, ululations, and the metallic swooshes of drawn swords, conjuring the rage and urgency of a warrior preparing for battle. But tune out the intensity and you’ll hear a syrupy Elyanna croon (in English) “I’m ready for the water.”
Elyanna has downplayed the political undertones in her music, but Woledto represents her most socially charged project yet. Across the album, subtle yet poignant references to identity, displacement, and cultural resilience underscore her sorrow and ferocity. She brings her own perspective to Arab hits most often interpreted by men and celebrates her feminist inspirations, whether through direct sampling, stylistic channeling, or collaborative work. On the tambourine-tinged anthem “Mama Eh,” a pissed-off Elyanna seeks her mother’s wisdom to cope with unrequited love and constructs a rallying cry for women in search of matriarchal strength.
Elyanna’s debut album comes at a tumultuous moment. On one hand, her star is ascendant. At the same time, Palestine—her homeland—is in crisis. Children of the Arab diaspora never forget where they came from. After all, “How can a soul forget someone it adores?” Elyanna muses on the closing piano ballad “Sad in Pali.” The intangible echoes of our beginnings linger in nostalgic realms like music and movement, practices that evoke the abstract idea we call home. “Through distance, you’ll learn the meaning of togetherness,” Elyanna reassures in the outro, reciting a poem written by her mother. “Through distance, your heart will learn the meaning of drought/And your heart will learn the taste of return/After the wait.” It’s a declaration that reverberates far beyond the stage.
