PBG: 3-Question Artist Interview with Dalinda "The Nile"
- Produced by a Girl™
- Jun 24
- 4 min read
Welcome to the PBG Interview Series where we interview talented artist Dalinda. “The Nile” is a melancholic indie-pop song that mixes dreamy vocals, world-music-inspired chill-out sounds, and rich live instruments, all without using samples. Produced by Pete Murray, the track is very personal to Dalinda. It was inspired by her mother, whose portrait is on the cover and who was brought to tears when she first heard it. Dalinda’s music reflects her multicultural roots; she was born to Bosnian parents, grew up in Libya, and now lives in the UK. Her background comes through in her work, from her debut album Turquoise, produced by Hossam Ramzy, to her Arabic chart-topping song “Leish” with Hamid AlShairi, music featured on MTV’s The Sarah Silverman Show, and multilingual releases like Waternixie and Songs from Libya.
1. Your music has always felt like a journey, weaving together your Bosnian roots, your childhood in Libya, and your life in the UK. With “The Nile,” it feels like all those places, languages, and memories come together in a really special way. Can you share how those experiences shaped the song’s emotion and the way it captures love, loss, and memory?
“The Nile” is the first song I ever wrote. It came to me somehow in a hurry, out of the blue, as if it got ready elsewhere, and I was simply going to transport it to its final destination. It was a difficult period in my life, somewhat of a crossroads, and the first experience of losing someone very dear. I was told by many that the melody carries within it that particular Slavic melancholy, some others have commented that the harmonies are Arabic…to me, the stories that I tell through my memories are simply that, my stories. The Nile is about love. A love that was brighter than the stars, a love that was older than the Nile’s flow, and a love that was lost. A love that left, and its leaving could never be accepted. It is about the love that fills the soul and enters the pores and without which everything loses its point. Maybe it is about the love we all wish to have once in our life, and maybe it is about the love we all fear to have. For me, it will always be both the diagonal line of silver across the impossible expanse of a slow, blue, lingering river, and my mother, stoic and straight-backed in the abyss of her loss, half face turned, with a tear she tried to hide.
2. “The Nile” feels like a bold step into a more melancholic indie sound, but you still keep those gorgeous world textures that define your artistry. What did exploring this new direction let you express that you couldn’t quite capture in your earlier world music, crossover, or electronic tribal projects?
My earlier projects were vibrant and outward-facing, built on movement, and celebrated by it, not shy of energy. The beat was, in so many ways, the focus, not surprising since the first albums were produced by the brilliant Sultan of Swing - as many called him - the late Hossam Ramzy, the master of rhythm. He would end his messages with ‘much rhythm’, the word ‘rhythm’ replacing the word ‘love’! My path towards this moment, in fact, began with Turquoise and I remember thinking (and I think it may be even written in its liner notes) that I was searching for my shade of blue within the sound and the melodies. So... when “Waternixie”, my last album arrived, the blue had ripened from the stark vividness of turquoise to a deeper, slower, darker lapis. The lyrics became more inward looking, and I was confidently taking my veils off, settling musically in a more exposed space. “The Nile”, though, is an ironic twist in all of this. It is, after all, the first song I wrote, so does that mean I am now back to square one? Definitely not. It perhaps simply proves the point that we may, as people or as artists, always be as much what we run from, as what we run towards.
3. It’s so moving that your mother was brought to tears by the song, even without knowing the English lyrics, and her portrait on the cover makes it even more personal. What did that moment show you about how music can speak to us emotionally, even when words aren’t understood?
Music transcends language, it explodes straight into our primal human experiences, it is right there in our amygdala before the words are even formed…It is, perhaps, music’s unique power. How else can we explain the magic of Mozart, for example? With “The Nile”, though... My mother felt something, possibly because she was my mother, and which I only realised then, at the very moment of seeing her tears on her half-turned, hiding face: her grief, the dark but transparent depth of her sadness and loss - that was my Muse. She was my inspiration. And she understood that. I was her mirror, and maybe, for the first time since my father’s passing, she saw her own pain the way I did. And, at that moment, even learning the words, and the words are about the universal idea of love so great that its perishing will stop the longest river in the world – even that would not have made a difference. She did not need the words to feel her pain.
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Written by: PBG Press Chief Editor Mary Knoblock
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