Arooj Aftab appears on Song Exploder podcast and talks about how ‘Mohabbat’, her Grammy Award-winning song went from idea to execution to a final version that is a part of her album, Vulture Prince.
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s listeners, critics, or people who accidentally come across a good song in a sea of mediocre music, we tend to have our own interpretation. As time passes, our interpretations can change but one thing remains a constant: it is a good song. Otherwise, why would we go back to it and find newer meanings, or build newer emotional connections each time we play the song. They automatically find a space in our own list of best songs and so on.
Not all good songs, though, register on our radar the minute they release. Sometimes, we’re too engrossed in other music material coming from prominent, high profile music series to even notice what is outside of the corporate dimension and find such a song.
However, when certain figures highlight a song, it can – at least in some cases - see a massive shift in terms of audiences and rise from obscurity to prominence.
A case in point is ‘Mohabbat’ by Arooj Aftab.
When it was shortlisted by former American President, Barack Obama (the two-term Democrat and first African-American to hold the office) in his Summer playlist for 2021, Pakistan finally woke-up to the talent of Arooj Aftab.
We were also quick to judge the artist based on the fact that ‘Mohabbat’ was not an original. Except it was. We had heard one version by Mehdi Hasan but several other artists had sung it including Ali Sethi.
However, Arooj Aftab’s version was never an imitation or a cover. It was her singing a famous Urdu poem by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri that is approximately at least a century old. ‘Mohabbat’ is therefore not a cover. It is an impressively deep, lush and anguish-filled song and a brilliant one. Aftab’s voice – in this song – reminds me of Reshma and even Begum Akhtar and yet it has its own cadence, vocal intonation that belongs to Aftab and her only. She went on to win a Grammy in the category of Best Global Music Performance for the song. In the same year, she also held a nomination in the category of Best New Artist.
The Pakistani-American artist, who is from Lahore and spends most of her time in Brooklyn, New York may have given Pakistan a groundbreaking achievement by winning a Grammy and everything else that followed, but in the country, some believed that she won for a cover song and not an original and didn’t give credits to the right people.
Having spoken to Arooj Aftab on the matter and written a piece on it, regurgitating the matter is fruitless. Arooj Aftab will follow her path as a musician, working on multiple fronts. She is a producer for a mini-album by Anoushka Shankar. Aftab has released a powerful album (Love in Exile) with what can only be deemed a supergroup as her co-collaborators on the album were Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily. In addition to touring with the super-group, she also confirmed to Instep that she will release her solo album in 2024.
As Arooj Aftab soars to greater heights, we came across her dissecting ‘Mohabbat’ on a podcast called Song Exploder where artists dissect their own songs and talk about how the idea of a song goes to execution from an idea.
I would consider it a South Asian standard; there are some pieces that are literally handed down and treated exactly the same way.
– Arooj Aftab
In order to find the podcast featuring Arooj Aftab, you need to scroll through many such episodes because this audio program has been at it for years. But when you do find it, it is an eye-opener.
In the case of Arooj Aftab, a singer, composer and producer, she appears on Song Exploder’s episode 231 which has a duration of 24 minutes. Do not find that length daunting because time doesn’t play a factor if you listen with a sense of focus and hold back on procrastinating while listening.
Hosted, produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway in Los Angeles, Song Exploder boasts an eclectic list of guests including Fleetwood Mac, Billie Eilish, U2, Metallica, Solange, Lorde, Yo-Yo Ma, The Roots, Bon Iver and several others.
In each episode, Hrishikesh Hirway first treats listeners to a brief history of the artist from personal geography to making history (Grammy nominations and one win) before we hear the artist dissect their song. But his introduction is not so long or tedious that you get bored. Au contraire, it is a guide to those who do not know an artist at all. Once the introduction part is over, we hear in Arooj Aftab’s own words about the larger history of ‘Mohabbat’ including when the idea of the song was first born, and how she arrived at the version of the song that won her a Grammy and stands as a song today.
During the 24-minute episode, Arooj explains how the song consists of lines from a poem by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, who was born in 1912. “He wrote this beautiful poem of which I’ve taken some lines and adapted them into my song.
“Many, many different singers from South Asia have rendered this poem to song over the course of time.”
In between conversation, a small clip of the acclaimed ‘Mohabbat Karne Walay’ by Mehdi Hassan is played in the episode.
Aftab goes on: “I would consider it a South Asian standard; there are some pieces that are literally handed down and treated exactly the same way…”
She goes on to add that ‘Mohabbat’ is one of them.
But there is more to the episode. We learn how Aftab first heard it when she was six or seven, how it’s had different arrangements over the year but none of them were satisfactory because of how much she loved this poem and went through “many different sonic iterations” and how she arrived at a point where the song started to feel right. She speaks about her collaborators, instruments and what ultimately made ‘Mohabbat’ the version that it is today and one that was good enough that she put it out on her record, Vulture Prince. There are so many little anecdotes Arooj Aftab recalls in this episode, providing us a window into the song in a fashion we did not know before. At the end of it, you arrive at the conclusion: ‘Mohabbat’ is not another cover song and Arooj Aftab is an enduring artist we should continue to follow – whether another Grammy nomination, performance on the Grammy stage or Grammy win comes calling or not. She has managed to do all three already, anyway.
To find the complete episode, you can head to songexploder.net
– Photo by Diana Markosian
– Watch this space for more on Arooj Aftab