New Delhi: Grammy-winning Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab joined Norah Jones on her podcast, where the conversation moved from Mohabbat, Aftab’s Grammy-winning Urdu ghazal, to Billie Eilish, before ending with Aftab singing Sunrise, which she said had been “my friend” for years.
Aftab and Jones spoke about their earlier run-ins, music school, making music at home, writing in Urdu, and the strangeness of returning to other people’s songs after spending years inside one’s own work.
Talking about Mohabbat, Aftab’s rendition of the Urdu ghazal written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, she called it “an old poem”. She compared it to “almost like a jazz standard” because so many semi-classical and classical singers had rendered it in their own ways.
“It’s almost like a cultural treasure,” she said. “It’s like the song that everybody knows.”
Aftab added that she had loved the ghazal for a long time and had performed it live in different versions for six or seven years before recording it for her 2021 album Vulture Prince. In 2022, the song won her the Grammy for Best Global Music Performance.
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Weird music people
The episode also had a fan-meets-idol story. Aftab recalled meeting Jones years ago after an Anoushka Shankar performance in New York. Jones had walked into the same elevator as Aftab. “I was having like a full meltdown,” Aftab said. She also told Jones she liked Easy, the Jones-Shankar song, except she called it Easy Listening.
“Everyone was obsessed with you,” Aftab told Jones about the time in 2006 when she released two albums back to back.
Aftab also spoke about moving from Pakistan to Boston at 19 to study at Berklee College of Music. She said arriving at music school felt emotional because everyone there had been the “weird music person” in their own high schools. It felt, she said, like arriving among people who understood the thing she wanted to do.
The two also performed Aftab’s unreleased song ‘So Easy’ and Billie Eilish’s ‘What Was I Made For?’ from the Barbie movie. But the full-circle moment came with Sunrise, from Jones’s 2004 album Feels Like Home.
For Jones, the duet was also a first. She said she usually performed Come Away With Me or Don’t Know Why when other artists asked for one of her songs, and could not remember doing Sunrise with someone else.
“So you’re the first,” Jones told Aftab.