Singled Out: Salim Nourallah's You Are Beautiful

Keavin Wiggins | 06-26-2023

Album art

Salim Nourallah just released his new album "A Nuclear Winter". To celebrate, we asked him to tell us about the song "You Are Beautiful". Here is the story:

"You Are Beautiful" started on a car ride. I was driving back from the airport with a friend of mine. He'd just flown into Austin, Texas, where we were about to embark on a songwriting retreat hosted by our mutual friend, Martie Maguire. My friend had just gotten a call from his partner. She was having a bit of an insecurity meltdown. After he got off the phone with her, we talked about it. He was really upset. It blew my mind that someone as all-around-awesome as his partner could ever feel jealous or insecure. Where were those thoughts coming from? I also knew that he loved her very much and there was nothing for her to be freaking out about.

The next day, while I was waiting for Martie, I started playing a chord figure on a guitar she had in the studio that was in "Nashville tuning." It's a special tuning that replaces the E, A, D, and G strings on a six-string guitar with lighter gauge strings to allow tuning an octave higher than standard. Everything in this tuning sounds shimmering and otherworldly to me. Anyway, the words and melody to "You Are Beautiful" appeared pretty quickly. They were totally informed by the guitar tuning and the previous night's car ride. It was a message to my friend's girl.

Once I got back to my hometown of Dallas, I cut an acoustic demo of the song then forgot about it for a few years. It wasn't until we'd tracked most of the other songs for "A Nuclear Winter" that I thought about "You Are Beautiful" again. I was looking for another couple of songs that might possibly fit in sonically with what we'd already recorded. We ended up cutting bass and drums to my original acoustic demo. In fact, the lead vocal on the album version was lifted from the demo. The other Martie(y) in my life - Marty Willson-Piper - had also gone back overseas by the time we tracked "You Are Beautiful," so his electric guitar parts were added while he was in Penzance.

This is one of my favorite tracks on the "A Nuclear Winter" album. I was thrilled with the way it came together. I especially love the hypnotic bass and drum groove that John Dufilho and Jason Garner put down. My dear friend, Paul Averitt, also came up with a stellar guitar hook that runs throughout the song. That guitar part relies heavily on a sound you can only get by running through the vibrato channel of a 1950s Magnatone amplifier. Marty Willson-Piper's atmospheric guitars are also brilliant. When I wrote "You Are Beautiful" in Austin, way back in 2014, I never imagined it would come together the way it eventually did.

Postscript: My friend is now happily married to the girl who inspired "You Are Beautiful."

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here