“I CARRY immigrant songs in my blood,” Piers Faccini tells me, “like fragments from a lost homeland that I’ll never find.” An unsurprising declaration, given his Italian, Irish and Ashkenazi roots, and that cosmopolitanism is ever-present on his new album Shapes of the Fall.

A beautifully lyrical and defiant response to “a daily witnessing of the dismantling of the natural world around us,” it’s also Fallccini’s response to “the daily round of news detailing our free-falling ransacking of the planet.”

Born in Luton in 1970, Faccini learned piano, guitar and wrote songs from his early teens. He discovered Malian songwriters like Ali Farka Toure and Boubacar Traore and Mississippi bluesman Skip James and this inspired him to swap electric for acoustic guitar. “I went in a folk direction from then on,” he says.

His passion is for musical dialogues around the Mediterranean countries that became a cornerstone of European musical culture, “places where Christians, Muslims and Jews cohabited and flourished from north Africa and southern Europe.

“[These were] places where people met via trade routes and returned with new ways of learning, musical modes and rhythms — conversing, crossing and leading to new, more hybrid ways of writing, narrating, playing and singing.”

For Faccini, such musical dialogues are our common ancestry and are a vital dimension of his album, which features Moroccan singer and Gnawa griot Abdelkebir Merchane and Californian songwriter Ben Harper, along with African instrumentalists playing the guembri string bass and bendir drum.

Faccini’s powerful lyrics, lucid and moving, are full of paradox: “I wanted to drown in the dust of a drought,” he sings. Influenced by Sufi poets like Hafez or Rumi, his songs are both laments and a search for hope via the exploration of ancient trance rhythms.

“The hope comes because I went looking for it in musical rhythms that have traditionally been used for healing,” he explains. “They exude a kind of light to offset the darkness.”

Living in the remote French mountainous region of Les Cevennes, he sees very closely the toxic effects of climate change on trees, insect life or birds: “Turn the tomorrow leaf over years/Page after page bled out tears,” he sings on Foghorn Calling while on All Aboard he exclaims: “All aboard, watch paradise burn/ Douse the flame, will it ever return?”

In Paradise Fell, he could be referencing Australia, California or the Amazon as he exhorts: “Bird on the branch with no say/Sing a little now for another way.”

And Faccini sings about rebirth after the fall: “You were the blood kissed by the thorn/ I was the wind in the leaf/ I wanted to fall or be reborn/ Fall or be reborn.” On Epilogue, he compares us to birds, “dipping into skies, aching to know flight.”

Post-pandemic, he hopes to tour these songs because “playing live is my lifeblood, to tell these stories and share my music with an audience.”