“It’s kind of my style to find the common thread between uncommon things,” says Grammy-winning musician, vocalist, and composer Arooj Aftab. “It excites me to do that through music: to weave a pattern that isn’t immediately visible or build a bridge between different sounds.”
Aftab’s self-produced songs flow through far-ranging forms and connect with increasingly broad audiences. There are nods to her jazz grounding (she studied at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music) but also elements of electronica, South Asian classical and folk styles, soulful torch songs, and bilingual lyrics that might reference 18th-century Urdu ghazals or modern city blues. Her work has soundtracked multilingual movies to indie video games.
Her acclaimed latest album Night Reign is essentially a love letter to life after dark, composed in the midst of tour travels. When we speak, she is already on the road with her band again, for an extensive live schedule that will include American, Canadian, and European dates. “I enjoy every night, every city, every audience,” she says, with a genial laugh: “This is what I dreamed of as a kid, since forever, and it’s one of the only things I’m good at, so I’d better like it.”
Aftab’s musical dreams began in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she was born to a Pakistani family. Having spent a formative (and challenging) period in Saudi in my own youth, I’m curious about how the place might have shaped her creativity.
“Growing up in Riyadh, there was that desert topography, those night skies, those sunsets,” she recalls. “From a societal perspective, I can see how it’s restrictive and weird, but from a purely elemental perspective, there was something very peaceful and orderly about it. It gave me a lot of time to be with myself, not in a lonely way.
“Music is connected to maths and physics and the fabric of the universe.”
“There was space. We’re talking about the ’80s and ’90s, so there weren’t lots of tall buildings and flashy stuff in Riyadh. I think you can hear the desert in my music and the kind of peaceful solitude: elements I inherited from there.”
When she was 11, Aftab’s family relocated to Pakistan, where she immersed herself in music, from pop TV channels to her own songwriting experiments. “I always felt an immense amount of joy and relief when I would pick up a guitar and just put a string of notes together that felt right to me, without necessarily knowing the actual rules,” she says. By her late teens, she was a mathematics and accountancy student but realized that music was her natural calling.
“Music is connected to maths and physics and the fabric of the universe,” she says. “You can get a degree in the science of music. I decided to do that at Berklee, no matter what it took. And it took the sacrifice of leaving friends and family behind, a massive student loan, the risk of it all—so many things.”
She adds that, though she studied only jazz, her lack of formal education in South Asian or western classical music left her “free to create my own pathways inside all the different types of music that I like.” She has applied that unbounded approach to her records ever since her independently released 2014 debut album Bird Under Water, though her third album, Vulture Prince (2021), proved a particular turning point. Vulture Prince’s intensely personal meditation on relationships, love and loss, is dedicated to the memory of her late brother, Maher. This collection includes the elegantly yearning “Mohabbat,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance and earned high-profile fans including Barack Obama.
Although Aftab gradually wrote and independently funded Vulture Prince while working a day job as an audio engineer, her latest album, Night Reign (released on major label Verve), was created in a relatively compressed period (“in a series of hotel rooms and voice notes on my phone”). It features regular collaborators, including American guitarist Gyan Riley (son of minimalist pioneer Terry), and guests such as poet-activist Moor Mother and Elvis Costello.
“The beginning of the journey of writing for me is coming to terms with what I’m doing or going through at that moment in time,” she explains. “So Night Reign has this kinetic energy. It has a tone that is a little more joyous, and it’s more a celebration of having arrived.”
Night Reign also reflects Aftab’s move toward focused storytelling, with highlights including the gorgeously evocative “Raat Ki Rani” (meaning “Queen of the Night” and accompanied by a sumptuously shot video directed by American actress Tessa Thompson), as well as “Whiskey,” a warm, wry, and relatable small hours serenade (“I’m drunk and you’re insane / Tell me how we will get home”), which has already proved a live favourite.
“The other night, I was singing the ‘Whiskey’ song, and the audience started singing it with me. I almost freaked out,” she exclaims, delightedly. Despite this apparent surprise, she is conscious that her music resonates on many levels: “A lot of the time, artists create these culture-shifting bodies of work, because when they were growing up, they didn’t find something like that for themselves,” she says. “I also think people hear something in this music that’s familiar and new at the same time—and that’s the best thing ever.”
She is instinctively drawn to this combination. It’s partly why she takes pleasure in touring, and particularly what she loves about Vancouver, where she will return in January.
“Vancouver is really cool,” she says. “I’ve been there two or three times now, and each time, it almost feels like a parallel universe New York. It’s not as dirty and crazy and fast as New York, but it has that kind of free-flowing vibe, like progressive, multicultural, lots of things going on. It feels familiar, while the excitement of it being somewhere else is amazing.”
While Night Reign evokes a sense of arrival, Aftab happily remains creatively restless. “Sometimes, I feel like my career just started—and that’s a good thing, because there’s so much more to discover and to explore and to work out, which is what it should be like,” she says. “It would be terrible to be an artist who’s all out of things to do.”
Read more from our Winter 2024 issue.
