My obsession with music was ‘not normal’, says Pakistan’s first Grammy winner

At the Wide Awake Festival in London’s Brockwell Park on May 27, under a blazing afternoon sun, Arooj Aftab walked onto the stage with a bunch of red roses and a bottle of wine and sang Baghon Main (In the Gardens), her version of the Mahiya folk song, from her 2021 album Vulture Prince.

This is the song she usually opens her solo acts with. “I’m trying to throw the roses from here to you guys back in the crowd, but as you can see, I really need to work on my upper body strength.” Aftab’s humour holds up well to her haunting voice.

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Aftab, 38, is the first Pakistani musician to be awarded a Grammy; she won Best Global Music Performance for Mohabbat (Love), in 2021. She was nominated again in 2022, alongside the Indian-origin British-American sitarist Anoushka Shankar, for her original song Udhero Na (Unravel It).

Before the song made it to the Grammys, Mohabbat was already a heartbreak anthem of sorts, and then it showed up on former US President Barack Obama’s summer playlist in 2021.

Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge /

Teri mehfil mein lekin hum na honge…

(There is no dearth of lovers around you /

Though I won’t be among them, in your gathering…)

the lyrics go. Written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, in the 1920s, and sung by the late legends Iqbal Bano and Mehdi Hassan in earlier versions, it was reimagined and composed by Aftab as a contemporary, post-jazz, minimalist slow-burn.

“It’s like chaku (being stabbed), but mujhe mazaa bhi aa raha hai (I’m enjoying it as well),” Aftab says of the lyrics, grinning. “There’s a gaslighting there; sometimes it’s political, sometimes it feels like your parents died, and sometimes it feels like your lover sucks.”

Aftab knows heartbreak and loss; it weaves its way through her music. In 2018, while writing the music for Vulture Prince, she lost her younger brother Maher Aftab, to whom the album is dedicated. The song Diya Hai (I Have Given) on the album is, she says, the last one she performed for him. In 2018, she also lost her friend Annie Ali Khan, who is credited for the lyrics to Saans Lo (Breathe). “Vulture Prince was coloured in so much pain, and that pain colouring is still a huge part of my life and music,” Aftab says.

***

Growing up in Riyadh in the late 1980s, Aftab was surrounded by classical and semi-classical music at home, much of it by artists from Pakistan and India. “My parents hosted parties that involved live music and they were constantly listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum, as well as live recordings that weren’t on studio albums. They were big fans of Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, almost obsessed with them,” she says.

The family moved to Lahore in the late ’90s. “I fell in love with the city, its beautiful gardens and the culture of art and music, even though I didn’t really have a backstory there, unlike my parents.”

As a teenager, she discovered new music herself, ranging from pop and jazz to contemporary classical artists from the subcontinent. “I found this album by John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain and Hariprasad Chaurasia and that blew my mind. I was obsessed with Begum Akhtar, moved on to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Hariharan’s Carnatic classical music. Kitne walkman, kitne discman ragad diye (There were so many Walkmans, so many Discmans that I wore out).”

Aftab says she soon realised that her relationship with music was “not normal”. “I was just: I’m obsessed with music, I have ideas about it, and I want to make it… basically the stages of finding out you’re a musician.”

She enrolled at the Berklee College of Music to study music production and engineering. “I started playing the drums, a little bit of guitar, but I chose to lead with voice instead of instruments. I think I did okay,” she says, smiling.

Her debut album, Bird Under Water (2014), with five songs, had a neo-Sufi soundscape and already, her sense of nuanced musical arrangement. She layers the accordion to suggest a kinship to the harmonium, uses long cymbal hits and the upright bass and delivers subtle melismas on songs such as Baghon Main (the song was reimagined for Vulture Prince). There’s a tip of the hat to Begum Akhtar’s Na Ja Balam (Beloved, Don’t Go). “Bird Under Water should have been called Arooj Aftab Sings Begum Akhtar,” Aftab says, laughing.

Her next album, Siren Islands (2018), was a collection of raw, ambient electronic music with her vocals drifting in and out of the pieces.

Aftab chooses musicians carefully, using a range of string and percussion soloists across her live shows and albums. “There needs to be a unified musical ethos. I look for the same kind of musically crazy person that I am. Hum sab pagal hain (We’re all eccentric).”

She collaborates often with women, and has worked with musicians such as guitarist Badi Assad, harpist Maeve Gilchrist and Shankar. “There’s this honest thought of all that we’ve done to be these women in music. You’ve shed your egos, and you make music with generosity. You see why men don’t want women to rule… it’s magic,” she says.

After she won the Grammy and began touring, Aftab, who lives in Brooklyn, has spoken often about how little musicians earn from live shows. “Being on the road for 200 days is beautiful but also brutal. There are so many variables, especially post-pandemic, as to why shows aren’t profitable for musicians, but there needs to be a better model,” she says.

She’s been writing music for a new album. “It’s nearly done, and it has more movement. I’ve carried Last Night from Vulture Prince into this one, in a different version from that semi-reggae one. I’ve worked with living poets along with the dead ones this time,” she says.

Meanwhile, she is still on the road. On June 2, towards the end of a memorable live set with musicians Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily as part of their Love in Exile (2023) album tour at the Barbican Centre in London, Aftab was in tears, along with many in the audience. It was an emotionally charged hour of ambient jazz. Singing Forgotten Land — “Old friend, I’ll see you again, under a heavy moon” — it felt like Aftab’s voice left the auditorium and crept back in to break time.

She had outdone herself, and sometimes an artist knows that.