Interview: Anees

Anees: “I learned to write songs by freestyling, and that’s still how I write most of my songs”

The Palestinian-Lebanese singer-rapper-songwriter, discusses his spiritual approach to making music and manifesting his biggest song to date, ‘Sun And Moon’

Anees is a singer-rapper-songwriter (his own term) who left a potential career in law to follow his dreams in music. Starting with his 2020 debut single, Neverland Fly, each new release is proof that he made the correct decision. Back in April of this year, he released the hearty love tune Sun And Moon, which is his most popular track to date. It’s scored over 35 million streams on Spotify alone and reached No 1 on the Billboard Philippines Songs chart.

With 2.6 million followers on TikTok, Anees has a fan base hungry to hear his debut album, due to drop later this year. One such fan happens to be none other than Justin Bieber. The Honest vocalist made an impromptu appearance on Anees’ Instagram live in April 2021, in which Bieber praised his discography, and the two shared a heartfelt conversation.

Not one to confine his talents, Anees’ music transcends genre and fuses rap, R&B and pop to achieve a one-of-a-kind soulful sound. In this interview, he dives into his past of delivering pizzas for a decade, talks about his upcoming album and East Coast Summer Camp Tour, and explains how his spiritual songwriting method has led to some of his most prolific work yet…

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Having graduated from law school before embarking on a music career, how much did music play a role in your life before pursuing it professionally?

“I think my life was always musical in ways that I didn’t understand. I’d always be expressing myself in musical ways one way or another, whether it was freestyling or singing in my car. I delivered pizzas for 10 years before, during, and after law school. When you deliver pizzas, you spend a lot of time just in your car, and the car is such a musical place. I think everyone’s car is a safe space, musically, for them. So in one way or another, my life was always musical. My parents raised me listening to Jim Croce, James Taylor, Lauryn Hill, Nina Simone… I sort of incubated in a musical space, and it took … my lowest point in law school to realise that music would be my therapy, and music would be my only real way out of a dark place.

“I think that’s what music is for a lot of people. It’s a lifeline. It’s like a guiding light. I just didn’t know that that was my career path. I thought it was just a hobby until I realised what maybe it can be.”

Was there a specific moment when you recognised you needed to answer the call to go towards music?

“I’ve tried to think about this. I’ve tried to pinpoint it. I think it was very subconscious. Most of these big decisions we make are never conscious; the real life-changing stuff is rarely an “aha” moment that you can pinpoint. It’s usually an accumulation of blessings. Sometimes the blessings are not what you would think is a blessing. It’s like a negative experience, but it’s still a blessing.

I BELIEVE THAT THE GREATEST SONGWRITING HAPPENS WHEN YOU’RE A VESSEL

“I was blessed to struggle with my mental health and loss. I was blessed to deliver those pizzas for all those years. I was blessed to play crossword puzzles as a creative outlet during law school in the bathtub. I think in some way or another, my whole being was just yearning to play with words, and there was no one moment where it clicked that that would be music. It was definitely a subconscious learning curve.”

What does your songwriting method consist of and how does your spirituality play a role in it?

“I think I’m a little bit different than the traditional songwriter because I learned to write songs by freestyling and that’s still how I write most of my songs. I’ll just click record on my watch or on my other phone and I’ll either use a beat that I have – or sometimes with no beat. And I’ll just freestyle the melody that comes to me, which ties in so truly with the spirituality because I believe that the greatest songwriting happens when you’re a vessel, not when you’re strategically constructing the lyrics and saying, ‘Yes, this is the literary device I’ll use here.’

“I think the best and purest songwriting happens just through you, not by you, and for me, as I freestyle, that’s kind of what happens. It’s like a process of letting the inspiration flow through me, and typically, that is most of the songs that I end up writing. I’ll fine-tune them after, and sometimes I’ll sit down with them afterwards with a pen and a pad and put the polishing touches on it. But freestyling is probably 75 percent, if not more, on some of my songs, which is beautiful for me because it allows the music to be so free.”

Are there certain practices that you’ve found help open you up more to becoming a vessel?

“Yeah. I think the easiest way to enter into that vessel state is to not try hard. That sounds counterintuitive. You would think, you’re writing a song, you’re going to want to give it your best effort and give it 150 percent.

“I think it’s sort of about framing your perspective. I think when you frame your perspective that, ‘There’s no pressure, there’s no stakes here. This is not a deadline or a task. It’s a spiritual practice. It’s a therapeutic exercise. It’s healing. Music is healing.’ When you frame your perspective that way, you are most free. You are most unencumbered by stress or expectations, and that’s when the best art comes. The best art is free. Art is an expression. It’s not a performance for me. I think that’s the key – framing my perspective before every time that I write that, whatever comes for me is not to be expected any one way or the other.”

Anees: “I spend a lot of time in my car. It’s a creative space for me.”

What do you recall about the day you wrote Sun And Moon?

“I was in my car. I spend a lot of time in my car. It’s a creative space for me. I was manifesting. I had just gotten home from being out of state, and on my drive home I continuously manifested to myself that I was going to write something that was my best song ever. I just said that over and over and over again. I thought it a million times. I tried to reinforce it and speak it into existence that when I got home, I was going to write my best song ever.

“There’s so much power in that. There’s so much power in reinforcing to yourself what you believe. Especially as a songwriter, because sometimes as songwriters, we don’t remember how easy it can be. We focus more on writer’s block. We focus more on scarcity. We focus more on the rarity of writing a special song. But I think that the truth is, it’s actually quite easy when we allow it to be.

“When we tell ourselves, ‘I’m going to write something incredible today – not a hit, but something special.’ When I tell myself that, time and time again, it always happens. That same day, I wrote three other songs that are going to be on my album, and that was probably just the one day in particular where I practiced what I’m telling you the most. You know what I’m saying? Where I didn’t just say it, but I lived it. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. It’s as simple as removing all self-doubt, all delusions, from the process and just entering reality, which is, any day I can write something special.”

What happened next?

“So I was in my car, I was manifesting, and a friend of mine, a producer from the Netherlands, Sekko, sent me a beat, and I don’t remember writing it. It was freestyle, but I don’t even remember freestyling it. I have the recording, but I didn’t think to myself, ‘Alright, this is going to be a song about a sun and the moon.’ It just was completely transient. The energy just used me and went out in audio form. But I did know the moment that I sang it that it was special, and I did know the moment that I listened back to that recording that that was going to be a song that a lot of people would love.”

How does it feel to see that manifestation come to life through the response of listeners?

“Surreal, for sure. Because with this one song, I’ve seen more numbers than all of my other songs combined. But it’s a testament to believing in yourself, because there’s no such thing as overnight success. This song wasn’t the product of overnight success. It was a product of years and thousands of days of working and working and working until there was a tipping point. This was a tipping point for me. Sun And Moon was a massive paradigm shift for me that really crystallised a lot of the things that I believed could happen.

“It’s so reassuring because you can feel crazy sometimes when you manifest these things. You say them online, you say them on your Instagram story, and you think in the back of your head, ‘Man, these people probably think I’m fucking crazy.’ But then it happens, and the beautiful thing about when it happens is not for my pride to say, ‘Oh, I told you so.’ The beautiful thing is that anybody who was watching it and saw me speak about it from the beginning…now they have proof to do it in their own life.

“If I can be the example that makes it less scary to do these things, to manifest and believe in yourself and bet on yourself, then that’s more important than any award, any industry accolade. Just being able to inspire people, for me, is a spiritual reward.”

The live beach shows you’ve been putting on for fans this year look awesome! How did they begin?

“We started in January, and we’ve done three since then, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because it was just a very whimsical decision. At the time, I had a much smaller audience, a much smaller following online. I thought five people would show up, and 50 did. When we did it in April, I thought 50 people would show up, and 300 did. Then a few weeks ago I thought it would be 300 people, and it was over 1,000, and it’s so cool. I loved going to summer camp as a kid, and the beach shows are just the reincarnation of summer camp for me.

“Everybody is there sitting in a circle with their loved ones, jamming out. It’s exactly what I loved about summer camp growing up, and I’ve now found a way to have that forever. That is an actual dream come true for me. If you could have told the child version of myself that I could enjoy summer camp forever, I’d have been thrilled, and now I am.”

Anees: “The biggest mistake a songwriter can make is to stop writing because they don’t feel that they can write something good”

How excited are you for the upcoming Summer Camp Tour?

“I don’t even know how excited I am, to be honest with you. It’s not real yet for me, and most of these things aren’t real until you see it. The beach shows weren’t real until I saw them. Sun And Moon wasn’t real until I saw it become what it has become.

“This tour is going to be phenomenal. I know it’s going to be one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s my first tour, I know it’s going to be incredible, but I don’t know how incredible it will be until I’m there. I know that I’m going to be driving in a van with a lot of my best friends to 11 different cities and putting on what I know and what I manifest will be lifelong, memorable shows for my fans.

“I encourage everybody to show up, because I think that those nights are going to touch people’s lives in very real ways. I know my life will be touched by these nights. Life is very short so I want to give people something to hold onto, and I think that every show on tour is going to be something special to hold onto.”

And what details can you give about your impending album release?

“I’m going to put Sun And Moon and Slip on the album. Those are going to make it onto the album out of my already released tracks. Leave Me, which I know a lot of people online are very excited for, will be on the album. There are a couple of other songs, like Free Me and Thrive that will make their way onto the album. Apart from that, I think I’m going to surprise people with maybe five-ish other songs that I know, and I’m going to manifest this with you right now, are going to be bigger and brighter and even more impactful than Sun And Moon and Leave Me.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL, JUST UNDERSTAND THAT THAT’S A PREREQUISITE TO WRITING A GREAT SONG

“That’s the most beautiful thing, is when the songs that you haven’t finished yet become the best ones. I know that’s going to be the case, which is, for me, so incredibly thrilling because I told my producer my goal is to make Sun And Moon and Leave Me feel like the afterthoughts. When I do that, I think the music world will be very pleasantly surprised with what they find on my album.”

What lesson would you impart to aspiring songwriters as they develop their skills?

“Write a bunch of shitty songs. Just write them, write them, write them, write them. The biggest mistake a songwriter can make is to stop writing because they don’t feel that they can write something good. You cannot write something good until you write 100 shitty songs, 1000 shitty songs. I’ve got songs in my notebooks and on my MacBook that are awful, and I needed to get through those songs. I needed to put the work in. I needed to practice, to hone my craft. That’s the reality. I know we all think it’s, one day you just get this inspiration, and a hit comes to you. But the truth is, hits come from taking a thousand stabs at it, and that takes time.

“That takes effort, and it takes a willingness to fail. I think that the willingness to fail is crucial. A lot of people don’t want to fail. A lot of people don’t want to feel discouraged from writing something bad. A lot of people haven’t yet built up the resolve. The songwriters’ resolve is necessary and crucial to being able to write any song that is worthy of being called a hit. Don’t be afraid to fail, just understand that that’s a prerequisite to writing a great song.”

What is your greatest vision for your future?

“One day I will have a farm, a big farm, and I will invite all of my favorite artists to that farm, and I’ll jam out with all my favorite artists. It’s a very selfish visualization. But one day I’ll create a space, a physical space for a very wholesome, meaningful and spiritual type of connection on a musical level.

“I think I can engender an environment that allows for my fellow artists to tap into something very real. I think that’s one of my skillsets, to create environments for people. I know I can do that, and I can even do that for artists that I admire. I can even do that for artists that are my favorites. I’m going to do that and when I do that, I think that millions of people will benefit in the long run.”

You can find details of Anees’ Summer Camp Tour at linktr.ee/anees and to learn more about Anees and his music, visit aneesofficial.com

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