INTERVIEW: AROOJ AFTAB
Photo Credit: Tonje Thilesen
Interview by Miguel Gonzales
I had the pleasure to chat with Pakistani singer, musician, and composer Arooj Aftab before her first stop at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club, beginning her “Night Reign” tour. Her critically acclaimed 2021 album “Vulture Prince” has brought Aftab into the greater conversation of contemporary music, and her latest album, “Night Reign,” sees her plunging further to greater heights. We touch on her return to Boston, spectacles of the night, aspects of her artistry throughout “Night Reign,” and learning to appreciate autotune.
Miguel Gonzales (MG): How are you?
Arooj Aftab (AA): Hi, Miguel, how’s it going?
MG: I’m good, I’m good! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I know you’re a very busy person. I really appreciate it. This is really awesome.
AA: Of course.
MG: I know you’re going back on tour again. How does it feel?
AA: It feels good. Touring is something that I love, and I love playing music live. I’ve had a two-week break, and so I’m ready. I was starting to get bored, so.
MG: You have to keep yourself busy somehow.
AA: Yeah.
MG: And I know you’re starting off playing in Boston. It’s your first time playing at Paradise, right?
AA: Mhm, yeah.
MG: How’s it feel?
AA: It’s really exciting. I spent five years in Boston, and that’s kind of where I started my whole American journey, I suppose, so I have a lot of memories there. Paradise is kind of at this iconic place has been there for so long. I feel like I saw Erykah Badu there for, like, $30 back in the day. But yeah, it’s funny that I haven’t played there before. I guess when I was in Boston, I was in college and just figuring stuff out, so I didn’t play live that much. But yeah, I’m really excited. I’m always a little excited to go back to Boston and to play shows, so it’s going to be fun.
MG: Yeah, I read you went to Berklee. We’re not too far off; I go to BU. What was the college experience like for you, just being there for those five years?
AA: It’s cool! Boston is a college city; I wouldn’t call it a town. It’s definitely kind of crazy to be there, right? Because all of the music schools are there, and then there’s Harvard, MIT is there, and then even BC is there, you know, the Boston architectural schools. There’s so much art, music, dance, and then like, scientists across the fucking… scratch the F word, I’m trying to curse less in interviews.
MG: Oh no, you’re so good. You’re so good. I do it all the time.
AA: Yeah. Then there’s Tufts. It’s just such a melting pot. . . there’s Mass Art, there’s NEC, it’s crazy when we’re all there. And it’s not a big city, you can kind of just walk around and do the things that need to be done in Boston, which is really kind of a beautiful thing. That’s kind of a wonderful thing about the city, that there’s just so much raw, youthful creativity going on in so many different directions. It’s really exciting to be in that environment as opposed to somewhere like Northampton, and you’re just there. And there’s just Smith, and it’s just nice trees or whatever. You know, it’s like, kind of boring. But yeah, it was fun.
And, of course, I have so many important, formidable memories of being there. That’s where I saw Lalah Hathaway for the first time, that’s where I met Esperanza Spalding, that’s where I was walking in a hallway and I ran into Meshell Ndegeocello. You know, we were having beers at a friend’s apartment, and we could hear Sting from The Police playing at Fenway Park just from the roof. We didn’t really even have to go to the stadium show. There’s so many beautiful associations that are important to me that happened in Boston.
MG: Yeah, and everything feels so interconnected, right? I’ve been in the Heartland for quite some time. It’s almost like a culture shock, or at least to me, when I came to Boston, right? Everyone’s so interconnected, and everybody knows everybody and emerging throughout, what was that like? You know, just emerging from Boston, that your roots were sort of there.
AA: We have a lot of Berklee grads who move to New York to continue, or to begin their careers. There’s a little bit of a train there, you know. There’s a lot of ex-Berklee people in New York. You can only be [in Boston] as a college student. It’s not really like an adult place, you know. I wonder if it has gotten more diverse over time or not, but it’s also pretty white, so it’s not totally amazing to start your career there, in my opinion. Usually, you graduate, and then you leave. That’s what I did and I came to New York.
Like you said, because it’s so small and everything’s really close to each other, you get to know each other. It’s interconnected. When I went to New York, I had friends and already a network of people. I wasn’t just alone starting my life all by myself, so that was good. There was support that came from those connections that I made at Berklee and in Boston, and they still do to this day. It’s kind of great.
MG: Sure, and it’s known that you’ve been based in Brooklyn for quite some time, and I think everybody’s experience in New York, or any place that you go, when you’re established there for quite some time, it’s very different. And I’m just wondering, what is Brooklyn like to you? What is your experience?
AA: I love it here. Now that I’ve been here for almost 20 years, sometimes I’m like, where else should I go? I just don’t really know any other place that’s like it. We know for a fact that it’s such a fast paced place that inspires and creates competition and allows you to discover and experience things from all over the world that you wouldn’t otherwise, and it’s all happening in one place. It’s all happening in New York City, and then Brooklyn is kind of just an extension of that, and it’s great. It’s been wonderful for me, for my well-being, and it has kind of nourished my ideologies, and it has been wonderful for music and for friendships. Yeah, Brooklyn is where it’s at.
MG: I’m hoping to visit at some point, I’ve actually never been to New York.
AA: It’s going to happen. There’s no way it’s not going to happen.
MG: I hope so. I want to get into Night Reign because it is such a fantastic album. I wanted to talk a little bit about the cover, because what draws me into the cover was that it was so elusive and inviting, all black and white. I just wanted to know the origin on how that photograph was made, and what made you guys decide to shoot it in this oceanic scene?
AA: I really love the kind of quality that the ocean has at night. That shiny, silvery, shimmery, almost scary, magnificent quality, but it’s all dark. You can’t see very far, and you certainly can’t see in the water. What that does is that it makes your other senses more heightened. You can hear the ocean, and you’re relying on hearing it more. It makes the sound of the ocean much more epic, it makes the sky above the ocean and the stars so much more intense.
It’s a whole vibe that is not like your postcard ocean, palm tree, sunset, boat, like, picture of the ocean, right? That’s just amazing to me. I think that the night in itself as the theme of the album is simple and in your face, like, every 12 hours. It’s just something that we overlook in how beautiful and deep it can be, and how it has all these multitudes inside of it, the same way with the water and the ocean.
Figuring out some sort of nighttime photo was definitely on my list of things that we should do for the record. I just so happened to take a vacation to Brazil in December, and Kate Sterlin, who took the photo, was like, “Yeah, I’ll come and we can do the shoot there.” She’s insane, it’s really through her lens that we were able to capture that photo in that way.
I’m actually sitting with my back to the ocean, and she’s actually facing the ocean, and so she could get the waves coming and going. She had me sitting in a way that also is very elusive, because I don’t necessarily love being photographed with my full face. I like the sort of secrecy and shadowy stuff. She got the shot, and it had all those qualities that I love. There’s one thing that you see the ocean at night, and you see all these things, and you feel all these things, but it’s nearly impossible to capture what the human experience actually is seeing and feeling, but I think somehow she managed to. There’s a lot in that photo, like you said, and we’re really lucky that she flew all the way to take that photo and had the emotional ability to capture that.
MG: It’s interesting that you say shadowy, because it perfectly almost encapsulates the experience of night, right? It just almost forces people to be almost like observant and contemplative about your surroundings. I was wandering around and, like you said, Boston is a very open city, just wandering around listening to the album. My senses were heightened, like, there were many emotions spiraling.
AA: That’s why I picked the night as a theme, because it’s so many different things. When we were in college in Boston, when I was there, our nights were bonkers, nobody was being contemplative. We were just partying and we were doing endless jam sessions, just going from place to place living this very beautiful, youthful life in this place and that really didn’t ever end. And then when you do that and then move to New York when it literally never sleeps, yeah, it’s the same thing.
There’s so much fun in the night, and there’s actually a lot of activity and a lot of meeting people, and a lot of going out, right? Which is so essential for creatives, because we need to have social interactions, on 100, in order to feel stuff and to be able to then write about it. I almost feel like, for me, being isolated and subdued is not how the music happens. It’s being kind of rowdy and crazy in the streets. The night is this beautiful thing, because it is something that can hold all these things. You can be very social, you can be sleeping, you can be kind of sad and alone, contemplating stuff. You can do so many things at night.
MG: It’s just so sporadic and magical, right? Like, I can recall many nights on weekends, where I am up at like two in the morning with friends, having so much fun.
AA: Yeah.
MG: I wanted to get to the music, because “Bolo Na” is my favorite track off the album, especially for its thematics of capitalism and social structures. I was very surprised that you intertwined Moor Mother, who’s one of my favorite artists for a collaboration. I was just wondering how that came to be?
AA: Moor Mother is, like, amazing. There’s really no one out there like her, and she’s such an inspiring artist. The way she articulates really complicated and painful things. . . I can’t get past how it makes me feel. She can do that, and then write, and then say it really well, and it then can affect everybody else. That’s something that I haven’t seen a lot. It’s really powerful the way she delivers it, and very simple, too. I told her that I wrote this when I was 15 or something.
At the time, it was like a love song, and kind of like a pleading sentiment, like, “Tell me that you love me, I’ve been waiting for you to say it and then you’re not.” Now, as it kind of resurfaced, I was like, I don’t care. We’re so tired with a shitty healthcare system, 50% income tax. Like, we have adult problems now, you know. Musicians not being able to afford healthcare, and the touring industry being so weird, and just capitalism, and the patriarchy and white supremacy just being at the forefront of everything, and the blueprint and design for all the things. And it’s just like, it’s exhausting. Whoever promised to love us and take care of us, was lying.
That got me really excited for the song, because I was like, “Oh, here we go. Another fucking love song from when I was 15.” And then when I kind of pulled it into this other direction, it gave it this new life. I asked Moor Mother to hop on, and I told her this, and she was like, “Okay.” She didn’t even have any follow up questions, she was like, “I got you!” And then she just sent me her bars, and I opened the file, put it in the session, and just played it through. And I was like, “Well, that’s done! We don’t have to do anything here.”
But yeah, it was amazing that she hopped on. It’s amazing the things that she’s saying about love and about the system in so much poetry and in so much musical beauty is what we have in common. It’s not harsh, and we’re not angry. It’s just what it is, you know? And I love the bass. The combination of the bass line and the drums on boluna is just so deadly. And then to just oppose it with Joel Ross playing vibraphone, which is a kind of magical, airy instrument. It’s not really metal at all, it’s just all really good things coming together to make that tune kind of badass.
MG: “Raat Ki Rani” was also another one of my favorites, and it’s prevalent that you use autotune, which I thought was absolutely killer. I love autotune, and I think it’s super overhated. What made you use it and how did it come to be?
AA: I’m so surprised how much this has come up! It’s actually kind of sweet in a way, because it seems that people that like my music, they really obsess over the purity of my voice. There’s a lot of like, “Oh my God, why did she use autotune!” It’s like, my voice is sacred to them or something, which is a compliment, I guess. To me, nothing is sacred. I love Kid Cudi, and, fuck it, like, Cher’s “Believe.” There’s all this iconic use of autotune in music that is so fun. It’s just a whole other thing, you know. It’s obviously not to pitch correct. I used it as an effect just to see how that would go. I want to participate in fun as well. My songs are always associated with bringing out the emotional sadness of people, or the contemplative side. And so I was like, “Man, I want to have fun too.”
“Raat Ki Rani” is about being at a party and making eye contact with someone that you’re attracted to. And so, it’s essentially not sad. It’s actually playful and flirtatious, and it’s about an encounter. I was like, “Let’s put autotune on this, just to see how it sounds.” When we put it on, it sounded like to me and my mixed engineer, we were like, “Whoa, we love this! Let’s just do it.”
It was a let’s just do it kind of moment. And, yeah, I appreciate that you like it. I think it’s cool. I think it’s really hot. (laughs)
MG: I was talking about it with a friend the other day, right? It’s like, yeah! These are just creative choices. It’s not that [artists are] trying to masquerade their voice or anything. For example, like, T-Pain, right? I love that first album that he came out with, my mom would just bump that in the car every time and I just loved it. And that man could sing, like, we saw that NPR Tiny Desk.
AA: Yeah, it’s great! Everyone needs to calm down. (laughs)
MG: I’m saying! It’s cool though, I really like it. It implements so much fun. I don’t know how people misinterpret it. It’s simply a creative choice, nothing else.
AA: I think the people who didn’t like it is because they like listening to my voice in a more pure way, you know, which just says that they’re kind of boring. (laughs)
MG: I’m such a fan that you talk about, like, minimalism and post-minimalism, which I’m absolutely crazy on.
AA: Dude, what is your major at BU? Why do you know this stuff? (laughs)
MG: (laughs) I’m a journalism major.
AA: Oh shit! Ok, word.
MG: (laughs) I just really love music, so.
AA: You’re doing good. You’re doing good.
MG: Thank you, I’m trying.
(both laugh)
MG: Julius Eastman’s “Femenine,” I love, along with his other work. Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass . . . I was just wondering what draws you to implement these repetitious, minimalist conventions?
AA: When I was at college, there’s this sort of intense overproduction and eagerness as young kids are learning how to play jazz. We’re young, and we’re being taught the tools, and then we’re overplaying. Everyone’s just kind of shredding. And there’s always this teenage youth focus on, like, how fast and how many notes per millisecond can you go? And you know, how do you show your chops? I think a lot of the music that I was hearing from my peers in school was really over the top and kind of soulless, not really telling a story. But of course, that makes sense, because we were focusing on skill and chops and stuff. Then in the broader music I was listening to, I felt things were really not breathing.
And then when I discovered Julius Eastman and Philip Glass and Terry Riley, all these minimalist composers. To me, their music felt like there’s a kinship between the ideology of slow repetitions. There’s this Sufi thought that everything is around the one. Time doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s slow or whatever, you don’t have to go into a trance. Even deep house is all kind of around that same ideology. There’s all these sort of minimalist functions that are applied in different styles of music that give it that breath, and give it that elegance in a way that it moves more naturally. And it doesn’t feel forced, right? And it gives it the ability to tell a story.
We fight with this all the time because, you know, the DSPs (digital streaming providers), they want two minute songs, and everybody is just constantly pushing and pulling around the length of things and how that equates to success or not, or where that puts you in the conversation, right? If you’re a minimalist composer, then you just think about those guys, like John Cage and whoever. But then, if you have these short, catchy songs, then you’re mainstream pop and that determines your whole kind of career. And it’s weird.
But for me, I have strived to find the middle ground where it can be beautiful, it can be fun, and it can also tell a story in a natural way, and it doesn’t have to feel like it’s completely fucking dragging, you know, which some of the minimalist composer pieces do.
It’s like, “Oh my god, like, it’s minute 14. And the same thing is just looping. Jesus. Like, am I in the mood for this right now? Fucking no,” you know.
Or it’s like, Thundercat, who’s like super groovy, and there’s space in his music, and it’s just awesome. And so in my music, I find that balance. If I’m writing in a solo, I’m like, go ahead and tell a story, you have time. I’ll sing very little sometimes in certain songs, and I’m just letting the music step forward and tell the story.
Yeah, minimalism is something that I discovered, and it really was the thing that I needed to hear. I was looking for it. And then after that, the way I decided to integrate it into my work is like a whole different thing, which I’m grateful for. Because to me, I think my songs are in the perfect middle zone of being not too long and very interesting, and still having space, still having this kind of natural storytelling capability.
MG: I don’t know how you feel about exposing your music to the younger generation, like myself. Like, I’m fairly young, right? Are you hopeful of the future of exposing your music to various generations?
AA: Yeah, yeah. I think the kids are good. I think that you guys are listening to a lot of different stuff. We’re in an age where everybody wants things to be non-binary and fluid, and that has translated to music as well. Everybody wants to listen to all kinds of things. Like, look at Willow Smith, and like her deep dive into jazz greats. If you listen to her discography, she goes from one [genre] to the next. And you know, the kids are listening to rock, and they’re listening to rap, and they’re listening to Sophie. It’s more of a crossover age, right? And that’s good for me.
It’s not just Dua Lipa or Terry Riley. You know what I mean? There’s so much in between, and I think the kids are listening to all of that right now, which is impressive. I’m like, “Yes, get off. Do whatever it is you guys are doing on TikTok.” But I’m also really glad that musically, there’s a sonic maturity there, which perhaps wasn’t always there. Because in our time, you know, they were just listening to the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls and nothing else.
I am still hopeful that I think this music should appeal to everybody. There’s also just so much music, right? Like, this year has actually been insane, like everybody and their mother has released an album, and more albums are coming. So it’s been a very heavy year of really good music. You can get kind of buried in there. But hopefully, as I keep going, I’ll keep gaining more and more listeners.
MG: I think it’s just cool that you’re inspiring others to tell their own stories, getting exposed to myriads and music, regardless of genre and cultural barriers. It’s like, almost like such a universal thing, right? I am from a Hispanic family and you’re kind of constricted on doing just like one thing, or talking about one genre, but it’s not really exactly just that. What are ways that have worked for you, especially in telling your own perspective, in which we can tell our own stories?
AA: It’s been hard because, you know, the majority of [my] music is not in English, and that’s been a bit of a challenge. Mostly only in the US, because I feel like it’s the one place where people are not used to listening to stuff that’s not in English. I feel like everywhere else, languages are so integrated that [listeners] don’t mind. But for me, I think I’ve relied a lot, musically speaking, on production and instrumentation to tell the story. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, you should be able to get it because of the story that the instruments are telling. It’s really hard and vague and confusing, but like that is what I do. I pay a lot of attention to the arrangements and the production and the instrument choices.
My story is one that I think people, in a way, they’re like, you know, I was born in Saudi Arabia, but I am from Pakistan, but then I’ve been [in the United States for] the last 20 years, and my music is this amalgamation of everything that’s happened from then. It’s a personal music, rather than any one genre. I’m a brown Muslim woman in music, who is kind of on the front, you know. And there’s times when that story isn’t necessarily the story that people are looking for, and it’s kind of difficult. We have this thing right, where it’s like, you just have to be a white guy with a guitar, and you’ll make millions.
At the same time, when people of color are trying to do art and are trying to do something contemporary, and trying to present a music that competes or is at level with everything else that’s going on, just like every other normal person. We get asked to explain our work so much, and that’s what comes with being of color. We have to explain ourselves, and we have to explain why we’re taking up space in the contemporary scene and fighting back from being coined as world music. A lot of times, people are like, “So you’re qawwalis and ghazals!” I’m like, that’s not what this is guys, I’m not traditionally trained.
This is not traditional music, and that is the story of being in the industry as a person who’s not really from here, but is very truthfully and very organically making music that appeals to everybody. It’s kind of shocking and exciting, and then they’re like, “How is she doing this?” That whole part of it is something that I think will always come with who I am and my position in the industry. But the music speaks for itself, and at the end of the day you either like it or you don’t, and that’s just it. There’s only so much deconstruction that we can do. But it’s good, because me doing this and talking about it and and being a person who paves the way in many ways.
It’s kind of a teaching moment, and then lots of other people who are like me, who will not have such a hard time. That’s how cultural change happens.