Stefan: “I feel that especially now we need hope for a better future”

With his guitar, a cinematic filter, and a tune that could fit in a spaghetti Western movies, Stefan brings to Turin an epic song about resilience.

However, the idea for “Hope” simply came from a love of Western movies. “This friend of mine who I’ve written the song together…he actually came up with that,” Stefan said about his collaboration with Karl-Ander Reismann. While he’s inspired by American music, it’s not exclusive to country–he takes his influences from Armenian and Italian music as well.

With traditional Armenian music, he had a fun encounter with a street musician in Sicily. He was eating pasta with his girlfriend when “all of a sudden, someone was singing. We looked behind and the man was singing…he stood up, came to our table, and starting singing to us–the whole time he was watching at my girlfriend’s eyes!

“He was going…I took his guitar and started singing an Armenian folk song, and then…he bought us two limoncellos.”

For rehearsals, Stefan and his team kept the Western vibe of the song, but modifying it to take into account the broken sun. Removing the cowboys from the national final performance, he said, “We did decide to change a little bit because we wanted to add more movement, more energy and…for the first rehearsal it was really really good.”

It naturally reflects back to the music video for “Hope”, filmed in the Tabernas Desert in Almeria, Spain. “It was very, very fun,” he says about the shooting. “The weather was nice, the people were nice, the prices were low–it was perfect.”

The music video shows Stefan buying his past memories, but the overall theme shines more brightly for him on the song. “Hope is actually really simple–as it says we all need hope, and we need to stay strong; we all want peace,” he says. “I feel that especially now we need hope for a better future.”

Stefan will perform “Hope” in the second semi-final on 12 May.