Layla Kaylif makes love feel like scripture on new single 'Walks on Water'

Layla Kaylif's 'Walks on Water' is built from translation in the broadest possible sense. Here, the Anglo-Arab singer-songwriter takes images and fragments from the love poetry of Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, reshapes them through her own writing, then allows the melody itself to pass through another voice before arriving at the finished recording as a duet with ISRA3L.

But rather than setting one poem directly to music, she treats the writing as living material. Images are rearranged, reframed and placed beside her own language until the distinction between literary source and contemporary songwriting becomes less important than the emotional world they create together.

Throughout the song, love becomes something larger than romance alone: prophecy, vigil, devotion and eventually its own kind of law. It's an ambitious lyrical frame, but one consistent with her own long-running interest in allowing Arabic and Western literary traditions to meet inside of pop music.

Nashville collaborator Reed Pittman took her original melody and returned it with a male interpretation, subtly altering phrasing and emphasis. ISRA3L then gives that male perspective its final voice.

His gospel, soul and alt-R&B background brings warmth and contrast to Kaylif’s delivery, but 'Walks on Water' works because it's structured as an actual duet, with the two voices overlapping and answering one another.

As the second single from Layla Kaylif's forthcoming album following 'Black Is the Colour', 'Walks on Water' offers a clear sense of the project's wider ambition. Her interests are in what happens when literature is allowed to move between languages, people, places and musical traditions. And on 'Walks on Water', that movement becomes the song itself.