Burn away the signs of life
My fingertips are roaming
For something else to hold me
Cause skin and bone don’t own me and neither will you
It comes early, before the bones have hardened, before the voice has found its timbre…this knowledge that the skin is a mask stitched in error. Girlhood, they call it, but it is a costume sewn too tight, its lace and ribbons binding like wire. You learn the world’s appetite before you know your own hunger. A smile becomes a shield; silence, a refuge. The body changes, not in the way you prayed, but in the way the world demands: every curve a trespass. Innocence is not lost, but stolen…and in the taking, you see yourself only as absence.
Bara Hari’s A Flower In His Garden unfurls like a fever dream blooming in slow motion. It’s her first release since 2023’s brilliant Lesser Gods, yet it feels born from a more ancient soil: psychedelic earth tilled by The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and the Swingin’ 60s fascination with the surreal. Sam Franco plants the listener in an Alice-in-Wonderland vision turned sour, where girlhood is both nursery and grave.
Her words twist through vines of floral allegory, thorns pricking at themes of identity, womanhood, and the unclaimed right to one’s own body. This is no idyllic garden: it’s a hothouse of hurt, the air heavy with unripe fruit and petals falling too soon. Franco sings of inhabiting a form that feels like a stranger’s, of drinking from a distant fountain in the hope of rewiring fate, of burning away the signs of life to find another truth beneath. Ian Flux’s production layers guitar shimmer, molten organ, and a rhythm section anchored by Lorne Walker’s stately drums. There’s a steady climb in the arrangement, as if the song itself is scaling that mountain fountain from the lyrics—always reaching for air thinner, purer, and more dangerous.
The video, conceived and directed by Franco, is a jewel box pried open to reveal something rare and radiant. Edited alongside Ian Flux, lit with ritual precision by Gabriella Bavaro, and captured through Ze Benedict’s lens, it glows with ceremonial grandeur. As a skilled costume designer, Franco created her own bespoke pieces: psychedelic neo-medieval finery steeped in Bob Mackie’s opulence, crossed with the vibrancy of Mexican folk dress and the theatrical allure of her namesakes Theda Bara and Mata Hari. The result recalls the ornate tableaux of The Color of Pomegranates and the saturated spectacle of ’60s television variety shows.
This is Bara Hari in full creative bloom – and full peril – pulling beauty from the raw soil of discomfort. The result is opulent yet unflinching, a rare flower with the bite of a Venus flytrap.
Watch the video for “A Flower in his Garden” below
Listen to A Flower In His Garden below and order the song here.
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