On his debut album, the New York musician threads Egyptian heritage and American folk songwriting into something that sounds like neither.
Michael Isaak’s debut album begins with a question he has been sitting with for most of his life: what does it mean to carry a culture you did not grow up inside? The Carpet Maker, out today, is the New York-based Egyptian-American musician’s most direct attempt at an answer, and it is a serious, carefully constructed record that earns every minute of its runtime.
The catalyst was a trip to Egypt in 2023 that Isaak has described as a personal and musical Renaissance. Back in New York, he spent evenings with his father watching performances and working through decades of Arabic music: Fairouz, Umm Kulthum, the Bombotaya folk tradition from his father’s hometown of Port Said. That immersion shaped both the material and the instrumentation. Isaak taught himself the Arabic oud during the making of the album, working with Sohail, an Iranian oud player, to bring Maqams, the modal systems at the core of Arabic music, into his songwriting. The sound he arrived at, which he calls Arabesque Folk, is guitar-driven but pulls unmistakably from that tradition.
“I began to go back and listen to all of the Arabic music from my childhood and reconnect with my culture. When I was back at home, I’d sit at the TV with my dad almost every night, and he would show me a different piece of music.”
— Michael Isaak
The title track, the first song written for the record, imagines an alternate life had his family never left Egypt, reaching back to childhood memories of his grandparents weaving rugs and singing folk songs. The lead single “Hold Your Keys” is more direct: a house key as an heirloom, passed through generations of diasporic families as a symbol of perseverance. Isaak also takes on Joni Mitchell’s “Eastern Rain,” reinterpreting it through Arabic musical traditions in a way that feels less like homage and more like an act of ownership.
The album was recorded at Laurel Road Studios in Chelsea, produced by Isaak with Finn Gardner-Puschak as session and mix engineer. Adam Chamberlain, who worked on Isaak’s first EP, mastered the record. The band features Remy Minkoff on electric guitar, bass, and keys, Giulianna Iapalucci on drums, and Sohail on oud. The production is clean and unfussy, giving the songwriting room to do its work.
The Carpet Maker is a debut that knows what it wants to say. Isaak is not resolving the tension of his heritage so much as writing from inside it, and the album is stronger for that refusal to tie things neatly together.
