Editor’s Note: Next year, Montreal-based singer-songwriter Paul Farran will release an album and memoir, both entitled Stems from Darkness.
Here’s how a press release describes the backstory:
“On January 14, 2008, he was in Kabul when two Taliban gunmen stormed the Serena Hotel. He escaped into the Afghan winter, covered in another man’s blood. Seven people did not. One attacker was captured alive, with the suicide vest he could not bring himself to detonate. Stems from Darkness (2027) is the work that followed — a continuous project across a 12-track album and a companion memoir, centered on rupture: how memory persists, reshapes, and resists resolution…His current practice spans album, memoir, and immersive narrative forms. Drawing on work and life experience in crisis contexts across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, his work unfolds through sparse arrangements and a sustained emphasis on narrative and authorship.”
The press release says that his “baritone-led and cinematic, narrative-driven and spare” vocals “sit in the lineage of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, with a modern sensibility shaped by Radiohead. Previously, he released two albums as The Camino Side Project: North America (EP 2019), and of movement & music (LP 2018), recorded across eleven countries. According to a press release, these works “explored longing, movement, and global encounter.” Before releasing music as a solo artist, he was a guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder of the Montreal alt-rock band Pacer from 1996 to 2004.
Farran recently shared his latest single “Eclipsed”, which vividly captures his emotional experience going from his worst day to his best. You can listen to it below:
Below, Farran wrote an exclusive Artist Essay for our SWT audience explaining the inspiration for the song.
My new single, “Eclipsed”, opens on bloody footprints of chase and escape. It ends with the sound of children playing.
Between those moments is the terrain of a book I spent years writing.
“Eclipsed” draws directly from central questions raised in my memoir, Stems from Darkness, a companion work to my forthcoming album.
The prologue begins:
Kabul stays with him.
Heat pressed into his chest.
A night that remembers.
The man has survived, but inside him gather storms — blood-dark, sudden, without warning. Even grace carries weight.
So he went into the abyss, to learn what darkness asks of light, what silence owes to sound, what hatred remembers of love.
He did not want to flee.
He wanted to stand inside — where opposites touch.
And when the blast burns even sound away, one question remains.
Am I still here?
—
January 14, 2008. The Serena Hotel, Kabul.
It’s 6:08 p.m.
I’m running in place, just breaking sweat as Radiohead’s In Rainbows soundtracks my early evening workout, drowning out the rumbling dissonance of recurring bombs that swell through the capital.
Boom.
The windows overlooking the swimming pool bounce in their frames. The air turns thick with raw dust, the taste of concrete on my tongue.
Entangled in my headphones, I leap off the treadmill, my legs still chasing motion.
And then, we return to our machines, reassured by the thought that this is just another day in Kabul.
I would later remember that moment as the denial before the storm, the calm that pretends to be courage.
The second explosion leaves no room for denial.
Shockwaves project me into the thunder, into the story I’ve failed to connect with. The walls twist. All seems static — frozen — laws of motion paused.
A gunman storms into the changing rooms. Men in towels, men in showers, a single chorus of screams, pleas for one more breath.
The gunman is silent.
His language the percussion of bullets.
A body — a young Emirati diplomat — folds onto me, his weight sudden and warm.
The bullet tears through his back and exits in a red bloom.
We escape through the gym, past the pool, into the Afghan winter. We hide behind a generator, surrounded by rusted oil barrels, waiting for what is to come.
Somehow, through the courage of others, I am rescued.
A few days later, in Dubai, I find myself drinking with an old friend, desperate to release.
That night I mistook noise for recovery — rum for warmth, laughter for proof that I was alive.
But I was still frozen inside Kabul.
Onwards from Dubai, I arrive in Cairo.
My mother runs to me at the airport and touches my arms and legs before embracing me. She needs to make sure I’m still in one piece, she says.
At my parents’ apartment, familiar fragrances fill the rooms. My mother prepares my favourite dish — Zucchini stuffed with spiced meat and slow-simmered.
Each bite draws me back into myself, a quiet reminder that I am still here.
With my parents, I knew who I was.
I was their child — that was my identity.
I could just be.
The noise hadn’t disappeared. But here, silence was a place of refuge rather than torment.
—
Kabul followed me for years.
In Rwanda, where I returned after the attack, fear settled into my days and nights. Sudden noises returned me to the hotel, to the blood, the hiding place behind the pool, the cold.
I would later write:
I dance with my demons so I don’t have to look at them.
Numbing quiets the noise, pads the silence.
But the darkness I carried was not only about what had happened to me.
It was also about the man who had killed and wounded so many.
Years later, as I began writing my book, I came across an interview with Qari Muhammad Ramazan, filmed inside an Afghan prison.
A young man in white shalwar kameez, fringe plastered to his brow, a neat Dutch-style beard, a bright topi cap.
My body went still before the image did.
My heart hammered at my ribcage.
Old gasoline — once more — met the flame.
Ramazan was real. Flesh and blood. Not a figment or dream.
The young man who had walked through the Serena shooting people was now staring back at me from a screen.
Attempting to make sense of him, I imagined the world inside his chest.
I studied his interviews, his body language, his eyes. I weighed my biases against research into the mindset of suicide bombers.
I could have described him through others, or left him behind.
But I needed to connect — and to release.
I began writing letters to him, seeking to understand his suffering, the choices he made, and the circumstances that led him toward martyrdom.
I wasn’t seeking to absolve him.
I was looking for something I couldn’t yet name.
—
A few months after Kabul, Susanne and I walked the Camino de Santiago.
In my memoir, I describe the impulse that brought me there:
Like a spider molting, I needed to break from the inside, shed a husk, and make space for the parts of me trapped beneath.
I wanted to emerge, not new, but more myself.
A million steps, through rain, wrong turns, unexpected encounters and moments of extraordinary beauty.
I slowed down. I took the scenic route. I began to trust the moments when my heart seemed to know the way.
We would marry at the end of that journey.
Eleven years later, Susanne and I were living in Hanoi with our two young boys. One morning, on a taxi ride to the U.N. office, Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker came through my headphones.
Something opened.
Lyrics arrived in minutes, jagged and bluesy, buzzing up through my spine.
I was close to Kabul again, but this time remembering it with something like love, something like gratitude.
That song became Absoluted, and eventually opened the way to the album and the memoir.
As I wrote, the experiences of my life began revealing their connections.
Kabul. Rwanda. My Egyptian roots. The music I had abandoned. The Camino. Susanne. Our children. Ramazan.
In my second letter to Ramazan, I wrote:
The emptiness is still there — it may always be. I’ve fallen into it more than once.
Before, the patterns were hidden, and that made it harder to rise.
None of these experiences exist as isolated trees — I see that now.
I had spent so much time examining individual moments, trying to understand them in isolation.
But the experiences, the love, the adventures — and also the fear, the fuckups, the betrayals — were the valleys and peaks of this life I was living.
From a distance, they began to form a landscape.
I have not written to fix a single moment.
I have written to unearth truth.
And on good days, I could return to that picture — a borderless canvas waiting for a few more brushstrokes.
—
“Eclipsed” carries this journey in music.
Its narrator moves through bloody footprints of chase and escape, pools of blood, pain, and fear.
Life with love, and with fear
Wait in silence; the noise will reappear.
He searches for his reflection, disappears into purgatory.
Then something shifts.
He saw his darkness
Eclipsed by the stars and a moon.
He digs trenches, in search of the womb, exposing love and confessions. Stardust trickles through. Hope begins to reveal itself.
A million steps, ascending the slope.
The images return in the epilogue of my book.
From the hilltop, he sees his path — once scattered trees, now a single canopy.
He walks the trenches alone, threading himself into the seams of the earth.
Digging into those trenches — with forgiveness, confession, and love — he unearths the darkness and finds it whole, part of himself.
A spark widens.
Clouds thin.
Stardust trickles through.
With every one of his million steps, layers peel — stems of hope reveal.
And then, without warning, a sound.
He still shudders at sudden sound.
The body remembers before the mind does.
A door slams — a memory opens.
In the silence that follows, there are still times when it is gunfire he hears, and quiet that he seeks.
But on the best of days, it is gratitude that steadies his pulse.
In “Eclipsed”, the man shudders at the noise once again.
But it resets him, not with fear
It is his children, playing, he now hears.
Like others telling incredible stories in their own words? Check out more Artist Essays here. Or choose your own adventure by restarting your journey on SWT here.
You can connect with Paul Farran via the links in his author box below
Paul Farran
Paul Farran is a Montreal artist and writer. On January 14, 2008, he was in Kabul when two Taliban gunmen stormed the Serena Hotel. He escaped into the Afghan winter, covered in another man’s blood. Seven people did not. One attacker was captured alive, with the suicide vest he could not bring himself to detonate. Stems from Darkness (2027) is the work that followed — a continuous project across a 12-track album and a companion memoir, centered on rupture: how memory persists, reshapes, and resists resolution. Baritone-led and cinematic, narrative-driven and spare, Farran's work sits in the lineage of Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, with a modern sensibility shaped by Radiohead. His current practice spans album, memoir, and immersive narrative forms. Drawing on work and life experience in crisis contexts across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, his work unfolds through sparse arrangements and a sustained emphasis on narrative and authorship. He is represented globally for sync by Ray-On Music Services. Prior, Farran released two albums as The Camino Side Project: North America (EP 2019), and of movement & music (LP 2018), recorded across eleven countries. These works explored longing, movement, and global encounter. Before his solo work, he was guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder of the Montreal alt-rock band Pacer (1996–2004).
