Kingsley Flood have a new record called Another Other coming out October 14, and for the first time in the Boston/DC Americana folk-punk band’s career, the album artwork features a photograph and not an illustration or drawing.
And for that, there’s a very good reason. Yesterday, Kingsley Flood frontman Naseem Khuri shed some light on the image, which was pulled from his family collection, and its ties to his upbringing.
“This one had been kicking around my family’s basement for years,” writes Khuri, who grew up as a Palestinian-American in the Massachusetts suburbs. “I hadn’t thought much of it — I thought it was some stock photo from a Time/Life Magazine type of thing, as it has that slice-of-life feel to it. Only later did I learn that the guy in the white shirt, smiling in back and trying to exert some sort of influence over the chaos in front was my father Shukri.”
Khuri adds: “This photo was taken sometime in the 1960’s in the mountains of Lebanon, where he was a camp counselor and where campers came from all over to apparently run amok and blow up Coke bottles.* The album is called Another Other, and on it, I’m asking all sorts of questions I constantly grapple with, on race, identity and privilege. I don’t presume to have answers, rather introduce the idea that these issues rarely fit in a nice, neat box. I love this photo because it blurs the lines: you don’t think of who’s white, who’s Arab, who’s rich or who’s poor. It’s not so easy to draw conclusions. I love that.”
In Khuri’s message, you may have noticed the asterisk. Turns out there is the possibility a pretty famous musician might be shown in the photo. He writes: [F]un sidenote: the boy in front with his hands on his knees is Stewart Copeland, the drummer for The Police. Or so the family legend says. We should send him the photo and see if it’s true…”
In advance of Another Other’s October 14 street date, and the November 18 release party at the Sinclair in Cambridge, listen to gritty lead single “The Bridge” via Bullett Media. And look pretty closely at the artwork below and figure out for yourself if that really is Copeland, who as a child attended the American Community School in Beirut before his family moved to England
