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'Music is My Passion', Abeer Nehme Tells Asharq Al-Awsat

Abeer Nehme
Abeer Nehme
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'Music is My Passion', Abeer Nehme Tells Asharq Al-Awsat

Abeer Nehme
Abeer Nehme

Surrounded by music and notes since she was a kid, and being passionate about singing until it became a life journey, Artist Abeer Nehme is deeply fond of music. She accumulated a significant musical culture that helped her create her own singing identity.

Abeer Nehme has recently launched her new album “Bisaraha” which includes a group of songs that reflects her artistic view. In the new album, which is her third collaboration with Universal Music MENA, Abeer worked with several composers and poets including Nabil Khoury, Suleiman Demian, Wissam Keyrouz, Ghassan Matar, Germanos Germanos, and Elie Nehme.

Among the new songs are “Ossetna”, “Sawt”, “Shou Ba’mel”, and “Al Milad el-Jayi”. The album also includes Nehme’s first Egyptian song dubbed “E’mel Nassini” written by Amir Teima, composed by Ihab Abdul Wahed, and distributed by Suleiman Demian.

“I had to make an Egyptian song because dialects are the key to communication with other nations. I thought I have to perform this dialect so I can address the Egyptian people in their language when I meet them. Since I was a kid, I sang Egyptian songs. This beautiful work is the result of a seamless collaboration with Teima, Abdul Wahed, and Demian, and I won’t be telling a secret if I say that I plan to repeat this experience in my coming albums,” Abeer told Asharq Al-Awsat about her Egyptian song.

Nehme pays special attention to the lyrics of her songs, believing that both the words and the music play a major role in any work she makes. “A song with great music and bad lyrics is not an option for me. I am keen to make songs that move me and the listener alike. The topic of the song must highlight a phase of my life, or an experience I lived, or a story inspired by people,” she said.

In “Bisaraha”, Nehme explores romantic and social topics with several messages that touch the listener’s ears and heart. It’s like a painting colored with music and poetry that takes you to a world of joy and peace.

Abeer’s performance and tone completes this painting, making the listener react unconsciously, and fly to an inspiring space drawn by Nehme in her own way. But how does she prepare for her songs?

“When I like a song, I try to sing it alone to see whether it harmonizes with my voice. This is how I know if it suits me especially in live concerts. I also focus on the impression the song might leave on others not only in recordings, but also in live performances,” she explained.

Recording her songs is not always an easy process because sometimes she doesn’t feel ready to enter the studio. “Sometimes, when I am not comfortable, my voice can let me down. Therefore, I have to be completely prepared and comfortable. But in many cases, I feel forced to overcome a certain situation and sing despite everything. Recording songs is not an easy process and its success depends on many factors,” she said.

Nehme says she wants her songs to satisfy people’s different tastes and souls. “The main goal is to present a beautiful material with a mix of emotions that accompany the album I release. Here, I should thank all the people who work with me, because making an album is like a workshop that must end with the best results.”

Nehme is planning more diversity in her works. After the Egyptian song, she’s considering singing in other Arabic dialects including Khaleeji. “Soon, I will start listening to new songs in Khaleeji and Iraqi. An artist must diversify his works while maintaining their special identity. Dialects don’t affect the identity, they rather enrich it. The communication through songs with diverse dialects bring people closer to the artist and the art,” Nehme noted.

About music in our current time, Nehme said “I really loved Nassif Zeytoun’s new song ‘Bel Ahlam’ composed and written by Nabil Khoury, with whom I collaborated in ‘Bisaraha’ and ‘Bala ma Nhes’. I also like Assala.”

How does Nehme see the changes and quick developments in the music world? “In my opinion, the changes music has been witnessing are faster than we can absorb. We face significant challenges today to present the music that resembles us. Every day we wake up to see a new trend, but in music, there are always beautiful works that warm our heart. However, there is no doubt that the quality of music has fallen back,” she said.

Like every year, Nehme will take part in the Beirut Chants Festival in a live concert celebrating the holiday season on December 4. Abeer is committed to this festival because it helps shed light on the Beirut of culture and art, and contributes to placing the Lebanese capital on the world’s art map. “It’s a ray of hope that highlights Beirut’s beauty and real face. In this festival, we assert that pain doesn’t eliminate hope, and the sound of music is louder than any other sound.”

Nehme is also set to perform other concerts in Arabic and western countries, including one at the Bozar Theater, Brussels, on December 11; and one in Sharjah on December 21.

“Music is not only my career, it’s my passion, identity, and the language that I use to express my feelings. It’s my first and biggest dream, and I will keep singing because it makes me feel that I exist. Music is me,” she concluded.

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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)

Over the years, Guy Pearce has been good in most all things. But he’s been particularly good at playing characters with a refined disposition who harbor darker impulses underneath.

That was true of his breakout performance in “L.A. Confidential" as a squeaky clean police detective whose ambitions outstrip his ethics. It was true of his dashing upper-class bachelor in “Mildred Pierce.” And it’s most definitely true of his mid-Atlantic tycoon in “The Brutalist.”

“I’m really aware of how precarious we are as human beings,” Pearce says. “Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. Moment to moment, we’re trying to just get through the day. We’re trying to be good. And we can do good things for ourselves and other people, but pretty easily we can be tipped off course.”

That sense of duality has served Pearce’s characters well, especially his men of class who turn out to have less of it than they seem. His Harrison Lee Van Buren in “The Brutalist” may be Pearce’s most colossally two-faced concoction yet. If Brady Corbet’s film, which was nominated for 10 Oscars on Thursday, is one of the best films of the year, it’s Pearce’s performance that gives the movie its disquieting shiver.

Pearce’s Van Buren is a recognizable kind of villain: a well-bred aristocrat who, at first, is a benevolent benefactor to Adrien Brody’s architect László Tóth. But what begins as a friendship — Tóth, a Holocaust survivor is nearly destitute when they meet — turns increasingly ugly, as Van Buren’s patronage, warped by jealousy and privilege, turns into a creeping sense of ownership over Tóth. The psychodrama eventually boils over in a grim, climactic scene in which Van Buren pronounces Tóth “just a lady of the night.”

“What was great to discuss with Brady is that he is actually a man of taste,” said Pearce in a recent interview. “He’s a man of class and a man of sophistication. He’s not just a bull in a China shop. He’s not just about greed, taking, taking, taking. It’s probably as much of a curse as anything that he can recognize beauty and he can recognize other people’s artistry.”

For his performance, the 57-year-old Pearce on Thursday landed his first Oscar nomination – a long-in-coming and perhaps overdue honor for the character actor of “Memento,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The King’s Speech.” For the Australian-born Pearce, such recognitions are as awkward as they are rewarding. He long ago decided Hollywood stardom wasn’t for him.

“I get uncomfortable with that, to be honest,” he says. “I’m really happy with doing a good performance. I can genuinely say within myself I’ve done a good job. Equally, I know when I’ve done a (bad) job. But I’m also well aware of how a performance can appear good purely because of the tone of the film. I might have done exactly the same performance in another movie with not such a good director, and people might have gone, ‘That was full-on but whatever.’ Whereas in this film, we are all better than we actually are because the film has integrity to it that elevates us all.”

Like F. Murray Abraham’s Saleri in “Amadeus,” Peace’s Van Buren has quickly ascended the ranks of great cinema villains to artists. The character likewise has some basis in reality, albeit extrapolated from a much different time and place. Corbet and Mona Fastvold, who are married and wrote “The Brutalist” together, were fueled by their hardships with financiers on their previous film, 2018's “Vox Lux.”

“We didn’t have a Van Buren but we certainly had our fill of complicated relationships with the people who hold the purse strings,” says Fastvold. “There’s a sense of: I have ownership of the project because I’m paying for it, and I almost have ownership of you.”

Pearce has been around the movie business long enough to shake hands with plenty of wealthy men putting money toward a film production. But he says none of his own experiences went into “The Brutalist.”

“There’s always this slew of producers at a higher level than us who come and visit the set,” Pearce says. “I’m polite and I go, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks.’ But I’m a little caught up with what I’m doing. Then three years later you’ll meet someone who says, ‘You know, I was a producer on “L.A. Confidential.”’ Ah, were you?”

Pearce, who lives in the Netherlands, has generally kept much of Hollywood at arm's length. In conversation, he tends to be chipper and humble — more interested in talking Aussie rules football than the Oscar race. “Any chance to have a kick, I'll have a kick,” he says with smile.

That youthful spirit Pearce tends to apply to his acting as well. Pearce, who started performing in the mid-'80s on the long-running Australian soap opera “Neighbors,” doesn't like to be precious about performing.

“If I’m hanging on to it all day, it’s exhausting,” Pearce says. “The thing that still exists for me is using our imagination, which is kind of a childlike venture. I think there’s something valuable about that even as adults. I think you can be all ages at all times.”

Pearce compares receiving the script from Corbet to “The Brutalist” to when Christopher Nolan approached him 25 years ago. Both times, he went back to watch the director's earlier films and quickly decided this was an opportunity to pounce at.

In digging into Van Buren, Pearce was guided less by real-life experience than the script. The hardest entry way to the character, he says, was the voice. “Thankfully,” Pearce says, “I’m friends with Danny Huston and he’s got a wonderfully old-fashioned voice.” He and Corbet didn't speak much about the director's hardships on “Vox Lux.”

“I know that it was troubled. Brady is going to have trouble on every film he makes, I reckon, because he is such a visionary,” says Pearce. “I know on this there were producers trying to get him to cut the time down. Of course, all those producers now are going, ‘I was with him all the way.’”

To a certain degree, Pearce says, he doesn't fully understand a performance while he's doing it. He's more likely to understand it fully afterward while watching. Take that “lady of the night scene.” While filming, Pearce felt he was saying that line to put Tóth in his place. “But when I watched it, I went: ‘I’m just telling myself. I’m purely telling myself,’” he says. “There’s something even more distasteful about it.”

It's ironic, in a way, that Van Buren, a man bent on control, is played so indelibly by an actor who seeks to impose so little of it, himself.

“There’s a performative element to Van Buren. He exhausts himself because he’s trying to dominate, to be the one in charge, be Mr. Charming,” Pearce says. “I don’t think he can ever enter a room without being self-conscious. That’s an exhausting way to be, I reckon.”