It might seem odd to some that Americana UK is premiering this new song from Farees, which will be released everywhere on the 30th of March. It’s a song that sees Farees taking what may seem like a radical new direction – ‘She Talks With Jesus‘ is a song that has a narrative folk ballad form, with an injection of Beatlesque power-pop which could not be further from the neo-funk and hip-hop that Farees is better known for. But, as he proclaims on his website “Change is my only Tradition“. He also is at pains to assert that he won’t be tied to any one musical genre – fair enough, but whilst he’s passing through what we might define as “our” genre we should certainly stop and take a listen.
‘She Talks With Jesus‘ is a song with a complex backstory – on the one side it is a critique of an absence of education surrounding mental health and global stigmas attached to giftedness and on the other it is a very personal story about Farees and his mother. As he explains it: “You know what happens sometimes in small villages, when you have a gifted person, and you have all the village berating or diminishing – trying to destroy that person. All of a sudden she’s the ‘witch’, the whole village starts trying to figure out ways to let her die or disappear because she’s supposedly a threat to this culture and way of life. And it’s done through division. For me, I lived it first hand, and it wrecked my soul. But it makes me stronger now. I went through all that and now…I’m really free because I know what spirituality really means.”
Farees relates that he and his mother had a miraculous bond with one another. “I don’t believe in giving names or categorizing supernatural experiences or labelling them when it comes to the unknown, but my mom sure had these – I’ll use the word telepathic – abilities to communicate with me when I was a kid. I’d be playing soccer or basketball miles away from home and then hear my mother speaking in my head, and be like, ‘Mom, is that you?’ and she’d respond, ‘Yeah, it’s me… come home, dinner is ready. Then it got to the point where I would try to trick her and say something random, but she’d repeat it to me when I got home: things she wouldn’t have known, like stuff about soccer, cartoons or video games. She always got it right, and I’d say – ‘No way, mom, get out of here. This cannot be real!’”
