Uzair Jaswal: "If I'm not on stage, where do I belong?"

The album, and a year that nearly stopped it

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Uzair Jaswal from Islamabad and asking, simply, what the new album is about. Uzair’s answer takes the long way around — because to talk about the record he is finishing, he first has to talk about the year that almost stopped him making it.

His last album, Na Bhulana, came out in 2017. Everything since has been singles, concerts, OSTs, two television dramas, and the steady drift away from the album as a form. “For a musician, it’s very easy to get distracted,” he tells Muzamil. “You take out a single every six months, every three months, every two months — that consistency, that flow — and people say, why do an album, just keep dropping singles.” He had plans for 2020. Doors lined up. Then live shows ended, and the rush ended with them.

Muzamil suggests that, for performers, stage time is closer to an addiction than a job. Uzair does not soften it. “If you’re an artist, if you’re a musician, if you’re performing on stage, that’s the only thing that drives you. If I’m not on stage, where do I belong?” The connection with the audience, he says, is a different energy, a different vibe — and the absence of it broke something. He could not write. He was paranoid in his own head, worried for his family, not going anywhere. He had zero inspiration.

The point he wants to land is mechanical, not sentimental. Inspiration, in his account, is a function of social interaction. “If you meet the people you love, your friends, your loved ones — that’s where it comes from. When you’re closed off in a house, in a room, how are you going to write? How is your heart going to be happy?” Many people told him a long lockdown was a gift for creative people — painters paint, musicians write, cooks cook. It did not work like that for him. It took most of the year to get back into the studio. The album that came out of it is nine songs, and he stopped there because nine felt like a number.

Three years old, full of music

Muzamil pulls the conversation backwards, into Uzair’s childhood in Islamabad, and the unconventionality of choosing music in a Pakistani family. Uzair answers by quoting a nursery school report card his mother still keeps. The principal’s remark was not about academics, which were fine. It said: “Your child is full of music.”

He locates the origin of his career at fourteen, when he opened for EP at a school-organised concert at the National Library — one of the first EP concerts in Islamabad. “At that age the excitement was just to be allowed one song at someone else’s gig,” he says. From there he names the venues that the Islamabad underground actually ran on — CJ’s, the open-air theatre, Paper Microphone, a small cafe in F-6 where he would just sit and sing for the audience. None of it paid. None of it had to.

The micro-economics of that scene are worth quoting directly. Uzair describes booking the upper floor of CJ’s himself, printing fifty-rupee tickets hand-written in pen, photocopying them, and selling them with a couple of friends. He performed at the curtain-raiser of an Islamabad play every night for the twenty-day run. “Whatever opportunity we got, we took it, happily. Because we were excited, we were young, we were just happy to have the chance to sing at all.”

His older brothers — Yasir Jaswal, and Umair Jaswal of Qayaas — were already inside the scene. He grew up at their gigs, often as their unofficial child manager, filming them on a Sony flip camcorder from the side of the stage. Tere Bin, he tells Muzamil, was written when he was still in A-levels.

A Hotmail he had stopped checking

The Coke Studio call came through the most ordinary route possible. Uzair had been emailing the show every year since season two — the same songs, the same letter, a request to be heard. By the third or fourth year, one of those emails reached the right inbox. They wrote back. He did not see the reply, because he had migrated to Gmail and stopped checking Hotmail. Umair, walking into an unrelated meeting at Coke Studio for Qayaas, was told they had emailed his brother and he had not responded.

When the TCS letter eventually arrived, he opened it with a friend present. He cried for ten minutes. “It was like a university acceptance letter, but bigger. At that age it was the validation for everything.” He admits, with some humour, that his university degree was delayed by years as a direct consequence — he was too excited that semester to sit his exams, and the excitement did not subside in time for the next set. He eventually finished an IR degree from the University of London external programme through UCL, switching out of economics because the math after O-levels would not stick. He went to his graduation specifically so his father could be there. The photograph now hangs over his father’s bed.

Tere Bin’s three lives

Muzamil asks the question that has presumably been asked at every interview Uzair has done: how Tere Bin became Tere Bin. Uzair’s answer is unromantic. The song was already big. A Bollywood film team reached out around 2016-17. He insisted he sing it himself if they were going to use it. The film’s distribution machinery did the rest.

The point he wants Muzamil to take away is not about the song. It is about what a big label actually does. “Here, you make the song. You promote it yourself. You push it yourself. You tell your friends to share. Some do, some don’t.” A label, in the Bollywood case, handles the release, the push, the placement. It is what Pakistan does not have, and what every interview circles back to.

He uses Tere Bin only as proof that some melodies survive their year. He still sings it live. The audience, regardless of age group, still sings it back to him.

Why the Pakistani music industry collapsed, and why it is coming back

This is the longest stretch of the conversation, and the most analytical. Muzamil maps out the timeline: a genuinely thriving late-nineties pop industry — Atif Aslam, Noori, EP, RDB, Battle of the Bands — that crashed after 2005 as concerts became unsafe to hold and music channels emptied out. Between 2005 and roughly 2012 there were one-hit wonders but no national-scale discovery. YouTube’s proper arrival in 2012, Bilal Khan’s Bachana, and later Coke Studio kept a thin line of continuity alive. The YouTube ban broke that line again. After 2016, the recovery began.

Uzair agrees with the diagnosis and adds the lived version of it. “When we were in O- and A-levels, there was a certain fear in the air. Things became difficult. People stopped enjoying their lives. It was the same kind of strange time last year was.” The commercial music economy did not collapse because Pakistani musicians stopped being good. It collapsed because the venues stopped working, and the music channels disappeared with the venues.

What is rebuilding it, in his reading, is the artists themselves — not a label, not a platform, not a benefactor. “Last year, every artist who broke through broke through because they were naturally talented and they put in the work themselves. Nobody helped them. They put themselves out there, and nobody can take that away from them.” Spotify and YouTube in Pakistan, he says, have shifted the economics enough that an independent release can find an audience. But he is careful not to overstate it.

The label-shaped hole

Muzamil pushes on the gap that remains. He names a few people running de facto labels — Bilal Maqsood, Xulfi — and points out the structural ceiling. One person can take a few artists a certain distance. After that, the artist has to do everything: the music, the packaging, the artwork, the pre-release, the post-release, the TikTok strategy. He tells a story, without naming the band, about a very successful, very old Pakistani musician whose team reached out asking for help understanding TikTok. Muzamil’s reaction to that was discomfort. “You shouldn’t have to do this. You’re the king. You should be making your music. Someone else’s job is to figure out how to convert that into a Gen Z vibe.”

Uzair completes the thought. “A label is an insurance policy. It says: you’ve extracted a lot, take a year off, we’ll keep you relevant. When you come back, we’ll have the world ready for you.” He worries that without that infrastructure, even the artists having a moment now will hit a ceiling they cannot push through alone.

He does not pretend international labels have arrived. He acknowledges the possibility that the current generation of Pakistani independents will figure something else out — that if they keep getting shows, keep connecting with their fans, keep being relatable, “everything will keep working.” But he agrees with Muzamil’s framing: at some point, the external push is what turns a star into a superstar, and Pakistan does not yet have the people whose job that is.

Islamabad innovates, Karachi commercialises

Muzamil offers a thesis he has tested across industries: Islamabad, because of its standard of living and slower pace, tends to be ahead of its time and good at experimenting; Karachi takes what Islamabad has experimented with and commercialises it at scale. Lahore sits somewhere in between. He notes the pattern across theatre, acting, and music, and observes that Islamabad’s talent often gets stuck — possibly because of an inherent burgerness, possibly because the city’s reference points in the 1990s were Bon Jovi and Metallica rather than Bollywood.

Uzair recognises the debate but argues it is dated. “It used to be a relevant debate. We were far from the industry, distance-wise, when we were sitting in Islamabad. We would never reach out because we didn’t think we needed the opportunity badly enough.” The digital age has neutralised most of that. He says half — more than half — of the actors doing well on television right now are Islamabad people he grew up watching in theatre. Productions now travel to Islamabad to shoot in Murree, Banigala, Chak Shahzad, and the city itself. “It’s not even about Karachi versus Islamabad anymore. It’s about who’s available, who’s around. Out of sight, out of mind — that was the scene. The digital age has made everyone everywhere.”

He calls it nationalisation rather than globalisation. The cities have moved closer to each other. Islamabad, he says, is finally getting the importance it always had in the heads of the people who grew up there.

The album, and what love is doing in it

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil brings him back to the record. The album is a deliberate move away from organic instruments toward electronic production, written and composed without the usual collaborators sitting in. It is about love — the only subject Uzair has consistently written about since the beginning. “If anything, the greatest thing in this world is love. I’m a romantic. At least I like to think I am.” His own heartbreaks, he tells Muzamil, helped him write through it.

He is firm on what the alternative would have produced. “If you’re writing a song and you’re not writing through your experience, the listener won’t connect with it. The essence is — write with a true heart. Pen down what you’re feeling, and make sure it’s relatable.” He talks through Saiyaan Ve, an older song where the chorus turns at the end — Jaan Ve becomes Jaan De — because, in his reading, “if you love someone enough you let them go.” The moments that make the work worth it are when a fan writes to say that exact line landed for them.

Muzamil closes with the same question he asks every guest. Uzair is thirty. In 2050 he will be sixty. How does he see Pakistan then? Uzair answers as an optimist. He wants Pakistan thriving, content, relaxed, tension-free. He is not planning to leave. He intends to spend the rest of his career trying to make his parents and his country proud — and he hopes the same is true of everyone watching.