IT’S A SIGN OF HOW MUCH AROOJ AFTAB’S LIFE HAS CHANGED IN THE TWO years since her beautiful third album, 2021’s Vulture Prince, was released, that she now has the dubious luxury of a stylist.
Inside Love In Exile’s “DIY punk egalitarian style” jazz free-for-all.
“Some days he wants to put me in, like, a giant leather flower or something,” she says. “At this point I’m just like, OK, fine, I’ll wear whatever you want me to. So long as I can move around and sit, we’re good.”
THE FIRST TIME Arooj Aftab, Shahzad Ismaily and Vijay Iyer performed together was in June 2018 at New York venue The Kitchen.
Aftab speaks to MOJO from her Brooklyn apartment, with another opportunity for directional stagewear on the horizon: it’s just days until the 2023 Grammy Awards, where the Pakistani singer and composer has been nominated in the Best Global Music Performance category for her song Udhero Na. She wrote the track as a heartbroken teenager in Lahore and she’s pleased with its glittering second life; if somebody had told her younger self where it would take her, she says, “I would not have believed the time-traveller.”
“I remember when we came off stage,” says Iyer. “Shahzad put his arms around the two of us and we all just sort of huddled for a while, initially just in silence. Then he said, ‘I’m not sure what just happened, but I’d like to do more of that.’”