Homeland

1. To The Forces
2. Silence
3. Any Story
4. Un Jour
5. Can We Dance
6. La Luna
7. The Blues
8. Broken Ones
9. Dream
10.  Cabo Verde
11. The Moon Is Full

Homeland is Hindi Zahra's follow-up to her 2010 debut album, the internationally acclaimed, best-selling Handmade. Then, Zahra was declared a "North-African Patti Smith", compared with Billie Holiday and Handmade described as "mesmerising elemental folk, a desert blues with an African-American twist."

After its release, she toured, performing over 400 live shows on five continents, before returning to the country where she was born - Morocco. Homeland is the story of what happened next - opening the next chapter for Hindi Zahra. As Zahra declares, Homeland is "my story."

"I thought I would record a Moroccan album," she says. "Morocco is strange. It's between everything, between the Americas and Europe. Everything comes there: India, the Middle East, Africa, Asia. My strange homeland is a centre. In Morocco you have everything: the desert, mountains, the ocean, the cold, the hot, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic."

More than the sound of her home country and her life without borders, Homeland is also a diary. "When I finished touring two-and-a-half years ago, I was very tired and going back and forth to Morocco," she explains. "I spent a month in the countryside and thought if I stay here longer it's right to wait for the things to come, not to rush myself. I wanted to calm myself in solitude."

Zahra chose a retreat. "It was three hours from Marrakesh between Agadir and Essaouira in the mountains," she recalls. "There were a few families around. I was a stranger at first, but then - not at all. You have the mountains and the ocean, two powerful elements. The place was in front of the ocean. Nature is the most inspiring thing. It empties your mind, inspires contemplation. You find yourself with the real thing, the elements, which is what I am made of. I wanted to find what I am made for and make sense of everything I do."

Once secluded, she waited for the music to come. She had her guitars and also painted, as she has always done. Music pushes her to painting. Painting pushes her to music.

For Zahra, music "is like a puzzle. I write lyrics, record percussion, layer guitars and the melody comes. When the melody comes with the guitar, I take the lyrics that I wrote, maybe four sentences. Then the melody starts to tell the story of the song."

The parts of the puzzle include Zahra's Berber roots, the music of Brazil, the Cape Verde, India, and Iran. Everything is brought together, just as Morocco itself brings the world together.

Rhythms are the starting point. "It's like the camel, a very beautiful animal," laughs Zahra. "He has his own rhythm, but his rhythm is powerful. I wanted to get that rhythm. I am obsessed with percussion. I listen to a Cape Verdean rhythm and I want to hear how it would sound with Shabia, the traditional popular Moroccan sound. I listen to Animal Collective, José González, hip-hop, Tinariwen. I'm also into Tibetan music."

When she was ready, Zahra began collaborating with Rhani Krija, the Moroccan percussionist who has also worked with artists as individual as Holger Czukay and Sting. He brought his instruments collected from around the world and Zahra recorded everything. Whether outdoors or in the studio, all the sounds were captured. Homeland is also a diary of how the album has come together.

The eleven songs were recorded in layers : in a riad in Morocco, in Córdoba with Spanish gypsy musicians, at the studio in the cosmopolitan center of Paris. Zahra is the writer, and she is their arranger and producer. "I went very far into self-production," she reveals. "Yet there was no pressure. I didn't think about it as a project, I think about it as a writer. For me, making an album is like writing a book."

Although the stories Homeland tells are her own, they of course bring in other people and places. This is Zahra's life and world.

Of "Any Story", she says it is my "ancestor's story. My grandmother's. My grandfather's too. It's what they told me, the way I received their teaching and what I finally found is true. Their wisdom of being honest with yourself."

Homeland strikingly includes "Un Jour" (One Day), Zahra's first song in French. An echo of the classic rainy day reflections of Françoise Hardy, "Un Jour" evokes a world where love has a bitter-sweet taste, where time inevitably passes after crossing the bridges of Paris and dancing to celebrate love. "It came like that" she says of "Un Jour". "It was inspired by France. It's the love story I wanted to tell. It happened like that in Paris, so the way I wanted to express that story had to be in French."

A pivotal song opens Homeland. "To The Forces" was recorded with Tuareg guitarist Bombino (Omara Moctar). This is Zahra at her most powerful. Percussion, Bombino's guitar and her yearning voice mesh like the swirling air currents of a storm. "To The Forces" is hypnotic.

"It reflects the time with people in the mountains. They are proud of their situation where they have the visions of the mountains and the ocean. The nature is so big, it makes everybody cry. There is a power of nature and silence. You feel so close to the sky. They find their own power." As well as power, Homeland has a seductive beauty which transports. "You can enter one song and travel with it. With 'La Luna' I chose to start from Cuba, and then it goes to Mali. The fantasy for me is that my music can make people travel."

"Can We Dance" takes Homeland and listeners to Latin America. With a swing tasting of Bossa Nova, Zahra romantically asks if she can be "be the one who sets the fire in you." As irresistible as it is nimble, "Can We Dance" moves the heart and the feet.

The exotic, moody and sinuous "The Blues" shows how love can banish the blues. "A heart of golden love will never die" asserts Zahra. Zahra herself has been on a journey. As well as music and painting, she has acted for the first times in Fatih Akin's The Cut and Tala Hadid's Itar el-layl (The Narrow Frame of Midnight). Asked about acting, she laughs. "It is like you don't know how to swim, but you jump in the water. It's crazy! How could I say no?"  

But music is her focus now, and soon we will be able to see Zahra live, bringing Homeland to life on stage. "I want to put all the audience in the same place, the same key. It will be raw. There will be more texture."

With the stunning Homeland, its interconnected songs and its heartfelt portrayal of her life, Hindi Zahra can't fail to make that connection. Her world, her homeland and her journey - all are now ours too.