Healing & Peace delivers ‘A Treatise’

To mark the mid-January release of A Treatise, the new, 10-song LP from Healing & Peace, Alex Mussawir penned a Substack post in which he condensed the last 15-odd years of his musical existence down into roughly 400 words.

Even in abbreviated form, Mussawir captures the chaos of these earlier days, where mishaps and bad luck occasionally gave way to moments that would in time prove life changing. Some years back, for instance, Mussawir bought a van for $900, which broke down in Chicago, where his band had traveled to play a concert. “A mechanic tried to repair it, and we were able to make it to another show in Bloomington before it broke down again,” he writes. “This is around the time I met Madeline, whom I would marry ten years later.” 

The couple now has two children who together have instilled in Mussawir a new sense of purpose. “It is common to hear people say they do not want children,” Mussawir wrote in an email interview a week after the digital release of A Treatise. “Becoming a parent is infinitely more meaningful than whatever I was doing before. Your efforts create the environment where something can grow. You become the soil, not the plant, if that makes sense. Much better.”

This focus on relationships and the ways in which we connect with and are altered by those we meet ripples throughout Mussawir’s Substack post, in which he recounts the myriad people he’s made music alongside in bands from Goners and Yuze Boys to Future Nuns and Kneeling in Piss, which would eventually become Healing & Peace. (In a 2023 Matter News interview, Mussawir spoke about how the name change served as an acknowledgment that he was now in a better place, saying that he was attracted to the idea of allowing the project to shift “based on life circumstances or worldview.”)

“I wanted to provide context for the album. It is like a You Are Here Map,” Mussawir said of his decision to recount the people and places that helped to shape him, and then in turn the music. “The album is written from the perspective of someone who has spent 15 years in and around an art scene.”

At times, the characters in the songs appear to dwell in these crowded, noisy spaces against their will. “Last one at the gig, first one in the car,” Mussawir sings atop the strum of acoustic guitar on “Instrument,” a song he said he wrote as he envisioned the narrator repeating the Prayer of St. Francis to themselves prior to a gig at Cafe Bourbon Street – a prayer that reads, in part, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

Elsewhere, the songs on A Treatise are populated by characters who long for the spotlight (“I’m the mezzanine man/In need of constant attention,” Mussawir sings on the gently urgent “Mezzanine Man”), kind souls naive to the cruelties of the world (“United Foodland”), and people struggling to find value in their creative pursuits. “The redemptive qualities of art/Vanished before me,” Mussawir sings on the spiraling “Into a Hole.“ “It was a mirage, a sick mirage.”

On Substack, Mussawir recalled how emerging from the pandemic he began to detach from the artform that had in many ways defined his young adulthood, sharing how he in the ensuing years he almost entirely stopped writing or even listening to music.

“There were many years where I worked at a music venue, played in bands that regularly toured, and booked a few shows every month, and I never felt worse,” said Mussawir, who described the period of him not thinking about or playing music as “ongoing,” allowing that he moved to complete A Treatise in part because the recordings sitting incomplete had begun to weigh on him.

And yet, the album’s title track seems to reflect an awareness of again taking up some kind of public mantle, Mussawir singing: “I return now to my post”; “I simply wanted to give an account of the world”; “Spectators, the lot of you/Different from last year.”

“‘A Treatise’ is the last song we wrote and recorded,” said Mussawir, who noted that the tracks written and recorded prior – a number of which appeared on previously released Healing & Peace EPs – had been “mostly observational, a kind of autofiction.” “‘A Treatise’ is about recognizing that a higher form exists but realizing one’s limitations in terms of creating it. The Great Contender. The Usurper. I tried to explain it concisely.”