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With a plethora of debuts each year, Coke Studio has readily become an incubator for new talent, upcoming artistes who want to showcase their skills on the coveted platform. However, this season, something has surely changed. No, it isn’t the number of debuts – which have possibly multiplied if anything – but, the amount of young blood from almost all famous music-oriented families. And, on the forefront of it all, is none other than Danyal Zafar. The young singer is all set to leave his mark on the audience with not just one, but two debut songs.

Speaking exclusively to Something Haute, Danyal revealed the type of relationship he shares with Ali, and how when the two collaborate, sparks fly.

“AZ and I have been working together in the studio for about 7 years now,” Danyal said. “So whenever I pick up a guitar and we’re together, we’re just bound to create something or the other. I mean you can lock us in a room together for a day and we’d probably come out with an album the next morning.”.

Ali and Daniyal Zafar will be seen performing together on the platform

Talking about their distinctive styles and the inception of ‘Julie’, the singer added,

“As individual artists, our sound and aesthetics have turned out to be slightly different with time but I’ve learned so much from him and we always find a middle ground that creates magic for us at the moment.  That’s how ‘Julie’ happened too; we had just wrapped up a recording session and I was in the kitchen playing a random rhythm on the guitar and he just hummed a melody to it with the first word coming out ‘Julie’.”

 

The song was not the first that he was asked to sing in the season. According to Danyal, ‘Julie’ came later than the song he’s set to sing with Momina Mustehsan.

“What kicked off the Coke Studio journey was the song that I’m singing with Momina, produced by Strings. I was having a tough time finding my sound as an artist in Pakistan and finally, when my album came into being and I knew what kind of music I was going to do, this song popped up right up my alley, a soft rock track with an airy melody. From the minute I heard it for the first time, till the moment I finally sang it, I was so excited. The song helped me be me, in the purest of ways. I’ve grown up listening to Strings, and it was more than just an honor being guided by them every step of the way till we finally nailed it,” the singer explained.

 

 

 

Shahjehan Saleem

The author is Contributing Editor at Something Haute as well as a professor in the Media Sciences department at SZABIST, Karachi. Socio-cultural theories and geography fill up the rest of his time.