#592: A is for Arooj Aftab

I go to a tequila bar
tonight, not for tequila,
but for food, in part because
it’s right behind
the liquor store, where I really
want to go, but also because
I need something to eat.
No kitchen. Everything on
the food menu is prepared
here inside of an air fryer.
I can easily go elsewhere,
elsewhere, but for convenience
and economics both,
I opt for air-fried chicken wings
and French fries.
There are only
three other people in the joint
besides the bar tender,
and one woman is loud,
uses the word “fucking”
to modify almost every noun
she speaks, so I sit outside
with my wings and fries
(which are, as you might expect,
terrible) and a pineapple hard cider,
in relative October quiet,
knowing, and counting on
the fact, that when I get home
Arooj Aftab is next, and bourbon.
Maybe the first artist in the collection
since the Bulgarian Voices
album I bought (late 80’s?)
who does not sing in English.
Aftab’s Urdu is indecipherable
to me and I resist any help
I might find from translators.
Her words still manage to find me
and those middle-eastern intervals
never fail to hypnotize, so on
Vulture Prince, when she kicks into
English and sings, “My lover last
night was like the moon, so beautiful,”
against what is essentially a reggae
feel, without any reggae instrumentation,
I find myself falling in love again.
In the morning, I put on Night Reign
and after breakfast I sit down
to finish this poem.
It’s been a long time since I sat
for morning meditation.
I fell off the cushion, as last night,
I fell off the wagon. Listening.
Aftab’s voice sings in English
on three of these tracks this time,
of whiskey and a drunk sleepy lover,
autumn leaves, falling, and in the last track,
a reprise of the moon.

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Notes on the vinyl editions: Vulture Prince, deluxe edition, 2022, some crackly distortion in places, which is kind of infuriating. I streamed this album a hundred times before I bought the vinyl, so the noise artifacts kind of bum me out. Live in London, record store day e.p. release, opaque red vinyl, 2023, live performances feature Anoushka Shankar on sitar. The title is kind of a misnomer. Only two of the four tracks on this e.p. are live. I’d have to listen really carefully and back to back to determine if the two studio tracks are different from their album counterparts on Vulture Prince. I didn’t do that. Night Reign, first pressing, 2024, silver vinyl. Disappointingly, also noisy. For Arooj Aftab’s meditative, quiet, trance-inducing music, I’d recommend the CD versions.

Postscript: this is the 2nd poem of what I hope will be series of poems inspired by the project of listening to every record in my collection in alphabetical order. Admittedly, “A is for Arooj Aftab” is a dumb title for a poem, but I think I will continue with this convention just so that readers can distinguish poems in this series from other poems. All of them will have dumb titles, then, indicating the letter of the alphabet and the name of the artist up for consideration, at least for now. I think the strategy I’d like to try is to write one poem for each artist represented in the collection, and not to publish that artist’s poem until I have listened to all the records in the collection by that same artist. You’ll have to trust me, to a certain degree. The poems may or may not be a direct response to the listening, but tangential, discursive, journalistic. Time has no meaning.