“Rock ‘n’ roll is full of twisted stories of siblings. I mean, we love it, don’t we? I think it’s fair to say there isn’t a single sibling rock ‘n’ roll story that’s just, they loved each other and got along and there were never any problems.” — Salim Nourallah
By Ryan Maffei
Photo by Ryan Maffei
Even though we’re closer (geographically) than we’ve been in years since I moved to Dallas’ Oak Lawn neighborhood, my dad and I just can’t catch the same concert.
For all the things I blame on him, he’s a lovely hang who always was my #1 musical gateway. His tantalizing record collection and mysterious pursuits in his basement studio sparked a curiosity about the stuff that enflamed into lifelong addiction. He was my concert buddy through my formative years, meaning I never bought a ticket. My sister and I were toddlers when the Breeders wished us a happy birthday from the stage. Brian Wilson on the SMiLE tour; an amazing acoustic Glenn Tillbrook gig; a Rainer Maria show where I quipped “Dad, we’re the oldest and youngest people here”. Lucinda Williams, Nick Lowe, Billy Joel — I saw a lot of great stuff because of him.
But, we were ships in the night with the Lemon Twigs, and worse for the Badfinger tribute event – both of them ideal for my dad and the kid to whom he passed on his Beatles obsession. And, in between, I found myself with the last ticket to a show by something called the Nourallah Brothers. Nourallah was a name I knew. Among seemingly innumerable artists of a certain age (i.e. Dad’s) who love drawing from the Beatles’ well (Teenage Fanclub, Mike Viola, Fountains of Wayne), Salim Nourallah’s haunting, lilting earlier albums were in regular rotation when my dad was driving.
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Nourallah had a delicate presence on record, but was great live, as I discovered in ‘09 when I saw him open for Rhett Miller in Austin. And while he couldn’t (or didn’t care to) match Rhett for heat or speed, he’d produced Miller’s band Old 97’s’ stellar, super-charged Blame it On Gravity, a highlight in their discography. Nourallah’s Pleasantry Lane Recording Studio is a modest-on-the-outside, luxurious-on-the-inside facility he’s kept for over two decades now, sought after by high rollers and small timers alike. And Nourallah has made many friends on the Dallas scene — he can scarcely go out for an interview over coffee (cough, cough) without being stopped for a handshake.
“Becoming a professional producer — I’d always wanted to be that. I’d always wanted to do that,” he explains. “But it was definitely borne out of, ‘oh no, how do I stay in music?’ Just doing my music, I know I’m not gonna be able to pay all these bills. The studio is incredible, because I’ve never advertised, I’ve never gone and knocked on people’s doors saying ‘hire me as your producer.’ And yet from the day I started doing it, people would just come to me. It’s just always rolled that way. But it was really bare bones at the beginning. Now, some days I show up and I’m like, God, how did this happen? Because it looks like Tom Petty owns this studio. Just the guitar and amp collection alone. I’ve never had a hit, or sold a ton of records or anything, and yet…”
The studio is concealed behind a house in a fetching little suburb, and in a shed sort of thing. Beside it is a small concert space Salim has similarly spruced up. This was the venue for the Nourallah Brothers show, the second of its kind. (Thank you to the two ladies who helped me find it.) Naturally, I’d at first assumed this mysterious second Nourallah brother would be present. But, doing a little research going in — in case I might want to, you know, write something about it — I found that this was not to be. Salim’s brother Faris had recused himself from the professional musical conversation many years before. The pair hadn’t even been speaking regularly for a lot of that time.
This two-decade-old Observer cover story vividly fleshes out a striking narrative. But to sum it up: Salim and Faris were El Paso kiddos drawn to their mother’s creativity over their father’s conformity. Tending a shared dream of pop and rock stardom from childhood through a joint stint at UNT, they formed a band called the Moon Festival, named for a Church song. When the flickers of success went out, the pair retreated to a barely-furnished space now d/b/a Salim’s studio. Licking wounds, yet sparked by the new working conditions, they recorded a few White Albums’ worth of songs whose purpose wasn’t clear, and split before they found someone who wanted to release it.
“I just happened to be giving out CD-Rs to friends, and one ended up being played on an Austin college radio station,” Salim recounts. “That’s what led to Brian Sampson from Western Vinyl, who had distribution with Secretly Canadian, finding us. There were no cell phones, there was no Google — it was from a physical article in a paper called The Met. John Dufilho called me when I was at work, at a CD shop, and said you have to see this article. And in the article Brian Sampson is looking for these brothers, he doesn’t know how to spell our name — nobody does, nobody knows who we are.
“And it’s insane; you could not have written this story. If John Dufilho doesn’t call me, I never see it. The Nourallah Brothers record is erased. Because it wasn’t an album, it wasn’t gonna come out, it wasn’t anything. And all of that happening led to everything that followed, including Faris’ first three solo albums and my first two, and then me getting signed to the German label Tapete, because one of the guys who ran the label’s drummer was on holiday in Italy and saw Nourallah Brothers and Polaroid. We would’ve never been in a music store in Italy without Brian Sampson and Western Vinyl. It all goes back to this insane discovery — I wish I knew what kid at the UT station played Nourallah Brothers, because I’d like to send him a check in the mail or something.”
This is the romantic part of the story, the Sliding Doors moment, and neat enough for a McCartneyesque cheery repetition. Yet, Faris is in some ways a phantom haunting the Observer article. At the time, he was in the midst of a sort of rebellious agoraphobia — fervently disinterested in society, he stayed home and made music instead. The article makes much of their seemingly irreparable rift. Faris is painted as obstinate, Salim as exasperated. Salim frets about his kid, Faris his girlfriend. Faris touts his newfound love for Catcher in the Rye, which speaks to him; Salim wonders if his brother knows that Mark David Chapman was carrying that very book when he shot John Lennon.
“Faris has always been way more radical than me,” Salim tells me. “Which is great. It’s something that I really like and admire about him. But it’s also… I was OK with having a more normal life. There are some things about society and convention that I accept. I’ve had a family, I’ve stayed in Texas, I’ve dug in, I’ve held onto it all — I’m recording in the same space we made Nourallah Brothers. I’m a man that doesn’t let go easily.”
What’s striking about Nourallah Brothers is its eccentricity — it’s clean yet homegrown, catchy yet elliptical. Its instrumental palette rejects the standard pop-rock template, favoring quaint, dulcet keyboard patches and sparse use of guitar and drums. It really doesn’t sound like anything else. This came from the shift from touring band to two-brothers-in-a-room. And while the one who likes playing live and aspires to produce is sedately collecting himself, the one who’s just discovering the joys of making his own music is blooming into life. That the former is the optimist and the latter the cynic makes for a lovely and lyrical balancing act. And to this day, Faris maintains that that was the only real way to make music: intimate, immediate, impermanent.
There’s something beautiful about sitting in a room with two dozen people, maybe two millennials-or-less among us excluding Salim’s kids (on chair and between-set music duty), who all adore the man on stage like he’s a Beatle or something. With Paul Averitt and then Chris Holt doing the harmonies and fancy guitar parts, Salim makes his way through a mix of songs from The Nourallah Brothers and thematic selections from his and Faris’ solo albums (Salim’s “Model Brothers”, or Faris’ “Faris is Not in the Band,” which Salim refers to as “my own diss track”). He repeatedly cracks that you can tell their songs apart because his have “too many words.” But often, you can’t — in their shared DNA is a knack for alluring chord changes and delicate melodies.
The Nourallah Brothers had been dormant until late last year, when Salim had a dark premonition about his brother’s health. In a startling coincidence, he then received an unprompted message from Faris, which broke a yearslong silence. Faris is still not in the band, not the Nourallah Brothers which played shows in December and March. But the affection and respect Salim has for Faris’ songs is so palpable it’s life-sized. They’re like his, with a surrealist tilt, a perpetual curiosity about roads less traveled, and lyrics not as concerned with mining the matter at hand as twirling around it. And Salim’s Nourallah Brothers songs are unlike anything he ever wrote, before or since.
The worn polaroid of two diminutive suburban cowboys which adorns the cover of that singular little album served as a projected backdrop to Salim’s show. And when Salim talks about he and his brother as a unit of dreamers, he lights up. When he’s discussing his own solo career, there’s a persistent air of modesty. But, it’s almost as if Salim is a fan as enthralled as his own when he thinks about the long-gone band he and his brother constituted. “I feel like we owe the young men that we were, that we sort of left high and dry,” he tells me. “I’m like, what if we went back and gave those guys some love and some respect and some high fives? And to say, ‘job well done?’”
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“I think the way to understand me and Salim would be to picture a 12 x 12 bedroom with two twin beds and a stereo between those beds,” explains Faris. They didn’t have much of an age difference; Faris is 18 months younger. “[So] when he grew out of his pants, I wore the pants. Our childhood was intertwined. So the discovery of music was a mutual, shared journey.” Salim discussed (with The Hang!) the seminal moment of taking home The Beatles, and sharing his mindblown enthusiasm with his brother. “It just had it all… And at that moment, I felt like the art form of pop music, or whatever you wanna call it, can do so many things.” Being the sons of an immigrant, and not blessed with a natural cool, the album served to galvanize a pair of born outsiders.
“I’m not much of a follower,” asserts Faris, who for all his past struggles has a sharper charisma than the chiller Salim. “I was the one that butted heads with my dad first. I was the one that said ‘What the fuck, I can’t go to prom?’” Yet he concedes there wasn’t much division. “People kind of viewed us as weird twins.” There were a few marginal differences: “I championed hardcore, like, the Clash, and at the time he was more into the Jam. But hold on — he loved the Clash, I loved the Jam.” And when Salim began to play guitar and write, it stirred no sense of competition. “I believed in his songs and his music so much. His songs were my songs. He wrote ‘em, I loved ‘em, and I did my best to support those songs and those endeavors. And they became my life as well.”
The brothers’ sights were set on escape as much as success. “We were always kind of oddballs. And, El Paso’s a very isolated town. You’re kind of in America, you’re kind of not, and then you wonder what real America is like. So it was like, we’re gonna get out of El Paso! We’re gonna go do it!” Sowing the seeds of future bands, Faris started out on drums, with Salim on guitar and vocals. “We went through various really horrible bass players — you could look back and laugh — and I’d bring out the guitar and I taught myself how to play. And, before long, it was like I was better than the other guys that were coming into the room. So, it seemed like it was easier to find someone to go boom, chick than to learn seven or eight chords to the tune.” Faris had a way of determinedly pushing himself into fluency on an instrument: “I didn’t work at it.”
“Faris is a virtuoso guitar player,” Salim agrees; he switched to bass when the group solidified. Always the more enterprising of the two, while Faris immersed himself completely in music, Salim set out searching for the new band’s big break. “It was a brutal slog being a Beatle-influenced band in Texas. When we got to Denton, it was laughable how we didn’t fit in. It seemed like every band in Denton at that time had a friggin’ bongo player. They were all jam bands. We were totally the odd man out in Denton. And the only way we were discovered was Bucks Burnett, of 14 Records. I would go after class most days, and one day I was buying a Go-Betweens record and a Church 12”. He said, ‘you look like you’re in a band’ — and of course I’m in a band!”
Burnett asked for a demo tape, “which then we slaved over for four to six weeks. And then one day I came back with it, and that led to our first record deal” (with Dragon Street Records). “[Bucks] was the perfect dude, because once I got to know him and be friends — I was friends with him for 30 years — he was another oddball. He loved the Beatles and the Who and the Talking Heads and the Church and the Sex Pistols. He loved all kinds of music from the non-mainstream. It’s weird to say that even loving the Beatles is not part of the mainstream. But, I do think that after the whole Beatles trip was done, and the ‘70s wrapped up, it did become kind of a cult of the Beatles. In places like Texas certainly, it’s almost a cult of the Beatles. And he was in the cult.”
“It was great with the Moon Festival,” remembers Faris. “Because I loved the guys that I played with, Brad and Tom. We got to travel America in a van. How freakin’ cool is that, you know? To go from New York to San Francisco with your best friends and your brother? And no one argued, no one drank. It was just good times.” Success proved naggingly elusive, but to Faris, “success was being able to make a recording, or the first time we got played on The Edge. Hearing ‘Desert City Sleeps’ on the radio, I thought, ‘We’ve made it man! Whoa, man! We’re on the radio!” But, he says, “I started to develop opinions about recording pretty early on. Torneo is when I’m starting to play bass, filling in when no one else is around — my multi-instrumental side kicks in. That record comes out and no one fuckin’ notices, and when they do we get ripped in the press because it’s not performable live. It’s not something you can recreate live.”
Salim’s vision was similarly evolving at the time. “I think what happened in the Moon Festival was, when we made Sugar Pill, we absolutely should’ve changed the name to fit the music. But I was hanging on to whatever. I think Faris would’ve burned it down and started over again multiple times. And he’d probably have been right.” By the time of this third album, Faris was beginning to feel a certain strain. “Recording was where I was happy, and then you go and become a furniture mover — I mean a guy in a band. We were sponsored by Bud Light at one period, and what that meant is we played 300 nights of the year, I shit you not. But it was like the Pig and Whistle in Arlington, on a Tuesday night. The bartender, two old codgers at the bar. I’ll never forget, one night, I’m standing there and this guy goes, ‘play me a solo’. So the joy was starting to slip.”
The band would, during this time, record themselves practicing on a Yamaha MD8 MiniDisc player — ah yes, who here remembers the MiniDisc era, testament to the transience of all such technology around the turn of the century? “[So] the band was disintegrating,” Faris continues, “meaning, you start to learn the club just cares about draw, and before you know it you get one gig a month if you’re lucky. So, it’s one gig a month, I have no fuckin’ job, I just got married for the first time, and she’s off at work. What the fuck am I doing? So, I go out to the MiniDisc player” — housed at the shared space Salim still uses — “and start fucking around. And before you knew it, it was like, ‘goddamn! I love music again!’ I’m not getting paid no matter what. There’s no money, there’s no rock band, there’s no fuckin’ rules. If I wanna cut a banjo, I cut a banjo.”
“I don’t sing and play. OK? I play, and then I sing. So with the MiniDisc player, I could play, and then sing. And at the time, I think even Salim would admit, it seemed a little bit daft, coz we had done Torneo in a state of the art studio. We had recorded at The Production Block in Austin. And then here’s stupid me with this Yamaha MD8 saying, ‘this is the shit!’ So basically, I quit the band. I was like, dude, I’m out. And at some point, I developed performance anxiety, I won’t lie. If it was every day, I would play TCU in the middle of the afternoon, in some hallway while kids are changing classes. But, man, you give me once a month? All that time in between? Not practicing all the time, feeling a little bit fidgety? It’s great when you think you can play a gig and turn someone on to your music. But at that point, there was no one being turned on.”
“In the late ‘90s,” says Salim, “the only cats in town that had recording studios were like, the famous ones. The only game in town was, unless you get signed to a label and they pay you to record, you’ve got nothing. I’ve lived through several revolutions, and the biggest one, as the major labels were crumbling, was the birth of home recording. So, Faris was the catalyst, because he was the one that advocated for it. But we didn’t even know we had gone into a record. We were literally just trying to survive. What we knew was, what we were doing wasn’t working. And I was the one that was still kinda hoping if we keep playing and doing the conventional thing, maybe we’ll eventually get a record deal. I still had one foot in band land while we made Nourallah Brothers. And we recorded a ton of songs, and didn’t know what it was, and then we stopped.”The collaboration wasn’t exactly, as they once said of John and Paul’s process, nose to nose. “Two is a bigger number than one,” Faris reminds me. “Salim can do things I can’t do, period.” But, Salim says, “the thing that’s most impressive is that [his solo music is] the work of one person. I’ve experimented with that way of recording, but ultimately the song drives everything, and the song is there before I start recording. The arrangement is sort of happening as the song develops. For the most part, he was creating as he went. Sometimes I didn’t agree with his arrangements because I tend to be more of a naturalist or classicist; I’m always looking for the emotional center of a song. Sometimes I would let him take a song that I’d written and kind of have his way with it, and a lot of the times I loved it, and then sometimes I didn’t like it so much.”
Still, when you play Nourallah Brothers, you hear a downbeat Salim, but also one who’s game for the shift in style. It’s almost as if he’s hiding out in these twee, uncommon arrangements, allowing himself more elusive melodies, of a more fragile beauty, than the sparkling stuff the rest of his career is filled with. And while he’s always effusive about his brother’s work when he speaks, I know the notion that Faris’ songs are the standouts on Nourallah Brothers really tickles him. The LP as a whole has the character of the wonderstruck, gently baroque early 2000s indie sound. But there’s something so vulnerable about songs like “I’ll Be Around” or “Christmastime,” it makes sense that this was music conceived with no audience in mind — though it always deserved one.
When Faris’ marriage failed, he whisked himself to Portland along with the MiniDisc player. His new habit of writing and recording wouldn’t abate for years. Meanwhile, Salim found himself in an uncharacteristic rut. “I quit music for two years. I tried to form another band, [but] I really didn’t believe I could play music without Faris, and I was depressed. I saw all the things that I couldn’t do, and not the things that I could do. And also the heartbreak of the dream, it always involved us together. And so this new dream of it just being me didn’t really appeal to me that much. And Paul [Averitt] was the one that was like, ‘you’ve gotta get back into this! Come play a show with me!’”
Salim got married, and committed to both a grounded, domestic life and a refusal to leave music again. Yet, he had to buy his dream back: the brothers had sold the space they recorded in to a friend. “A few years later, after I’d formed the Happiness Factor, I was driving down the street with my ex-wife and I was telling her, ‘I want to show you the old duplex we had because I miss that music room so much, it’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. And we were driving by and there was a ‘For Sale’ sign. And that’s where I began the process of OK, I can do this. I basically spent the last 20-plus years becoming a whole musician person other than this half that I was with Faris.”
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Faris and Salim’s albums are all of them gems. And, while both attained success well beyond Nourallah Brothers, each discography owes its distribution to that first release. Fans can blend contemporary ones together to make imaginary Nourallah Brothers records — Salim singing “it’s OK to be sad” slipping into Faris crooning “it blows, it blows, it blows.” While Salim’s work is masterful at best, the canon of a consummate craftsman, Faris’ albums are something else entirely. Your first impression, given how intently their creator touts their idiosyncrasy, is to marvel at how well-furnished they are: not outsider art, just sui generis. Problematico, King of Sweden, and Il Suo Cuore di Transistor are this writer’s personal favorites, while the auteur himself prefers Gone.
“One of the great things about [making those records] was, I had no one to blame if the track didn’t work out. I didn’t have to have guitar or drums on every song, with someone being like, ‘fuck that’. And there was no girlfriend around to like, question who the song was about. It was one sad, lonely dude’s journey into sonic happiness until it imploded.” Faris painted the covers himself as well, with a ‘faceless’ aesthetic. He developed a sizable European fanbase throughout the ‘00s. But then it all began to dwindle. “You burn out France, you burn out Spain, you burn out Italy. What the hell is left, buddy? You’re done. You can make it sound glamorous, like, I walked away, right? The bitch was dead. And at that point, I’d made more records than the Clash.”
Still, even Faris told me of his albums at one point, “they were never intended to be solo.” However content he’s been with his peripatetic journey — and he seems quite content, out in Manila — closure was always going to involve Salim. “It’s just good to have my brother back, man.” It wasn’t long before they decided to reignite the musical part of their connection. Salim has rescued a handful of tracks they never released, many of them Faris solo recordings, as well as outtakes of his own from the same era. And, via Salim’s studio and technology nowhere to be found when they were a band — including AI, all you “Now and Then” fans — Faris can contribute sections of songs, ideas for Salim to develop, and function as de facto coproducer and arranger. “I’m like, try a theremin, and he’s like, ‘a fucking theremin’?” And all of a sudden, I love the song, because he put a theremin on it.”
When I first came back to interview Salim, he was recording, with Averitt fussing over a bass part and Dufilho at the boards. It was a vaguely swinging-London tinged track called “Industry”, featuring “I’m Looking Through You” pitter-patter percussion, a grungy, cheeky vocal, and live horns, a frill Salim is not known for deploying on his records. It was a thrill to watch the meticulous producer in him at work. He told me that this was a song Faris had dreamed, and he’d been inspired to flesh it out. Another song they’ve threatened in the works is based on a stray quip Faris made in a recent interview about his ‘lawyer’, “Alphonse Alphonso” (“our Bungalow Bill”, says Salim). The Nourallah Brothers’ future is, for the first time ever, abundant with possibility.
Salim explains: “Part of channeling Faris is, my producer brain goes, ‘what would Faris do here? Oh, he might put horns here, OK. Let’s try it.’ Because in my normal state I would just normally not do certain things. It’s just been tons of fun, it’s been really freeing. And also to have a production foil, to have my brother, whom I respect immensely as a musician, as a writer, as everything. And for him to be, even though he’s not here physically, he’s still here, and he’s still 50% of the say, he either likes it or he doesn’t like it and he either agrees with it or we don’t. So it’s just been really great. And I only need like five or six good songs for my share, which is way less pressure than making another solo album. And he’s already got his songs, which are fantastic.”
“I think Faris just represents unfiltered creativity,” he muses. “Complete, unblocked creativity. At his best, he was constantly just in a 100% flow state. How many artists can do that?” But, he continues, “even if you try and even if you put the work in, you don’t necessarily find the audience. And it’s OK. It doesn’t mean you’re less than, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, it doesn’t mean you suck, it doesn’t mean anything. We have no control over how much we are loved by the world. Just over what we put into the world.” Faris has his own take on the question of success as a pop musician: “the fan must die for the artist to emerge. So at some point, the music fan in me died, and I emerged.” 25 years later, the stakes have evolved from life and death to just life. The Nourallahs’ legacy, and bond, is secure. Now they can both enjoy building on it.
