DUBAI: Jordanian singer-songwriter Jaafar will release his new single “OK 3adi,” on July 30. It will be Jaafar’s second release on Universal Music since signing with the label earlier this year.
“It’s upbeat. It’s pretty different to stuff I’ve done in the past. I wrote it really, really quickly — under 10 minutes, but then we spent quite a long time in the studio with the producer, Hadii Sharara, finding the sounds we wanted,” Jaafar told Arab News during his visit to Dubai this week, ahead of a couple of shows at YouTube Space on July 16 and the Apple Store in Dubai Mall on July 17.
Lyrically, the track (the title of which translates roughly as ‘OK, whatever’) is a breakup song, but not entirely miserable.
“It’s tongue-in-cheek. There’s kind of a sarcastic tone throughout the song. I’m saying, like, ‘OK, whatever, so you’re drop-dead gorgeous, I’ve seen other gorgeous girls.’ So it’s like there’s still a sour taste in my mouth, but I’m trying to move on. That’s the tone of the song,” Jaafar explained.
The track’s accompanying video is also directed by Jaafar — his second foray into direction following April’s “Ra7at 3aleki,” which was mostly shot on his phone in his bedroom.
“We’d shot a bigger-budget video (for “Ra7at 3aleki”) but it ended up very different to what I’d had in mind,” he said. “We had, like, five days left to submit it to the label, so I decided to just try and shoot something myself in my bedroom, and it turned out that I liked that video more than the one that we shot in LA, so we used that one.
“I guess I got the directing bug after that. I’m a bit of a control freak,” he continued with a laugh. “This way I can control exactly what the outcome will be.”
“OK 3adi” will, Jaafar said, feature on his upcoming EP, set for release this fall. And he’s excited to see how his new partnership with Universal will work out.
“One of the reasons I’ve never signed with a label before is that I never felt like people at the label really believed in the music,” he said. “I think what’s good about Universal is that they’re championing artists who are not necessarily your typical Middle Eastern artists doing the same old thing they’ve been doing for the past 20 years. I really feel like they want to push my music and get my name out there just as much as I do.”
