There’s something hypnotic about the way Nilipek.’s voice glides over the Turkish words in Yalan Söyledik, like a river flowing through stones you’ve chucked in yourself, trying to dam it up. Why this song? Why does this one snag me, tugging at some thread I didn’t know was loose? Perhaps it’s the language—this soft yet insistent Turkish that hums along like a secret you’ve overheard but can’t quite place.
Or maybe it’s the ethnic melancholy drifting through the melody, lingering like mist over a forgotten moor. I love languages, don’t I? Love their variety, their knack for feeling both foreign and familiar all at once. But there’s more here. Something deeper.
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There’s a riddle in it. “You’re still here, we lied, we lied,” she sings, and I’m still here—listening, rewinding, chasing after why I need this. Maybe it’s because there’s something honest in that repetition, in that admission of deceit. Nilipek doesn’t hand you answers; she doesn’t even pretend they’re hers to give.
She just leaves you with a question: what if this whole game is beyond our strength? And I sit here, mulling it over, listening again. Not because I want to unravel it, but because—perhaps—unravelling isn’t the point. Perhaps it’s enough to simply be—trapped between these four walls, with this song, with this lie that, oddly enough, rings truer than anything else.
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