Hanni El Khatib 'Moonlight'

After 30 days locked in hand-picked L.A. studio the Lair, the result is the album Moonlight—the rarest and most welcome kind of album, made at that perfect point in life where confidence, experience, and technique unite to help an artist do anything they want. To make Moonlight, Hanni needed the right engineer and the right place to record, the kind of place where they’d understand when he’d ask for ’62 Slingerland drumkit and obsolete fuzz pedals. And he found it in the Lair, working with engineer Sonny DiPerri. As the album developed, Hanni found himself playing almost everything, switching from guitar to bass to synth to Mellotron—sometimes several times during the course of a song—and even sampling and re-editing Ron Marinelli’s beats. It’s a personal album in the most primal sense, put together in any way that worked, with 11 new lightning-struck songs, each written and recorded in its own flash of inspiration. It sounds like an album made by an endless list of collaborators, but really, Moonlight was more like the first do-it-almost-all-yourself music Hanni ever made, except after six years recording and touring, he’d learned to do so much more.