This is how the death of a childsoldier friend saved my life…

Some songs are written. This one broke out.

After “How to Keep an Open Heart in Hell,” I said that creativity has the power to push a sound through a wall of concrete. This is that sound. A track born entirely in Persian, out of everything I could not say any other way about what has been happening to Iran this year.

We Love Life, They Love Death

Listen to “The Endgame” on Bandcamp

That is the whole song in one sentence. It is the oldest divide there is — and it is exactly the line running through this moment in Iran’s history. A regime that has built its power on death, standing against a people who simply want to live: to dance, to sing, to raise their children without fear. The game does not go on forever. It comes to an end, and everyone gets exactly what they stood for.

How It Came Together

For a long time, a sound had been circling in my head that I couldn’t quite place. Then anger and creativity collided, and the question became almost absurd: what would it sound like if Rage Against the Machine, James Brown, and The Chemical Brothers had a musically illegitimate child?

I called Anja Arnold — my favorite guitarist, and a fellow spirit from The Exile Orchestra. On the very first take, recorded on nothing more than my mobile setup, she threw down riffs other guitarists would kill for, almost as an afterthought. The drums came from KJ Sawka, whose live drum’n’bass and breakbeat playing I’ve admired — and looped on stage — for years. Everything else I played myself: trumpet layered over trumpet until it built into a James Brown-style brass section, bass laid down on keys.

The whole production came together in three nights.

The hardest part wasn’t the music. It was the Persian lyrics. For weeks they sat on my chest like a stone — until suddenly they didn’t. They broke out of me in a single wave, all at once, like something that had simply been waiting for permission.

Listen and Support

“The Endgame” is out now on Bandcamp. Every cent from this track goes directly to people affected by the violence in Iran.

If this song moves something in you, consider owning it — not just streaming it. It’s a small way of turning sound into support.

Listen to “The Endgame” on Bandcamp

We love life. They love death. Let’s make sure the world knows which side wins.

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over an artist when the news from home turns to blood.

This January, I watched footage of peaceful protesters in Iran being crushed underfoot by a regime that has never known another language. I sat with my instrument in my hands, unable to play a single note that felt honest. What is a melody, next to that?

The Women Who Carry the Fire

If there is one truth that has to be said first, it is this: the women of Iran are the ones carrying the weight of this revolution on their shoulders. They have been for years — since long before this January. They walk into the street knowing exactly what it might cost them, and they walk anyway. Not because they are fearless, but because they have decided that fear will no longer be the thing that organizes their lives.

I did not grow up watching action heroes and thinking that was courage. I grew up watching my aunts, my cousins, women I have never even met but whose faces I now recognize from a thousand shared videos — that is where I learned what courage actually looks like. Quiet, exhausted, unglamorous, and utterly unshakeable.

Beside them stand the men — brothers, fathers, sons — who have understood something essential: that human rights and women’s rights are not two separate causes, but one and the same. Their solidarity does not take the spotlight from the women leading this; it confirms what the women have been saying all along. Whatever freedom eventually comes to Iran will carry the fingerprints of both.

The Wall Between Me and My Own Voice

Here is the part that is harder to write.

As an artist, there is a specific blockage that sets in when the people you come from are burying their children. Every note I try to bring out feels like it has to pass through a meter of concrete first — muffled, distant, barely recognizable as mine by the time it reaches the other side. Composing. Lighting a stage. Choosing a lens for a video mapping project. For weeks, none of it wanted to come through the wall.

It is not that my roots are simply somewhere in the background of who I am. They are the face of everything I make. Which means when Iran bleeds, the wall is not abstract — it sits directly between me and the thing I am supposed to say next.

I know this blockage is not mine alone. Every artist whose roots give their work its face carries some version of it when that place is in pain. Is it not strange to promote your next single, when there are mothers who will never see their sons again?

I do not have a clean way through that wall. I am not sure one exists. But I have found something that lives right on the other side of it, and eventually became loud enough to carry through.

What Creativity Is Actually For

Creativity was never meant to be a luxury reserved for peaceful times. It is one of the few forces I know that can find a crack in a meter of concrete and push a sound through it anyway — not by pretending the wall isn’t there, but by turning the pressure of it into something that can be carried, shared, witnessed.

A song does not stop a bullet. A video installation does not open a prison door. But when I finally picked up my instrument again — hands shaking, throat tight — what came out was not denial. It was a way of holding what was happening. A way of saying: I see you, I have not looked away, and this darkness will not be the only story.

Creativity is not the opposite of grief. It is one of grief’s most powerful allies. It does not ask us to feel less. It asks us to feel everything, and then build something out of it that someone else can lean on.

An Open Heart, Even Now

I do not know how to make sense of a hundred years of struggle compressed into these last months. I do not know when — or if — the Iran I carry in my chest will exist in the world the way it exists in me.

What I do know: closing my heart would be its own kind of surrender. Every note I still play, every image I still create, every workshop where I ask people to feel their own bodies again — these are not distractions from what is happening. They are my way of staying human in the middle of something inhuman. My small, stubborn insistence that light is still worth making, precisely because the dark is real.

To the women and men of Iran, standing together — thank you. You are teaching the rest of us what it actually means to keep going.

And to anyone else out there trying to create something beautiful while their heart is breaking: keep going too. That is not denial. That is the work.