AMMAN: Early in her career, Macadi Nahhas was presented with a simple choice. The Jordanian singer was invited to meet a producer who — before listening to a note of the CD that the young, hopeful, 20-year-old was clutching — had one request: Turn around.
“So I left,” she says, recalling this career crossroads 21 year later. “‘Turn around’ — what do you want? Sadly, this is the way it happens. All these stars, sorry to say they’re not stars because of what they have — a voice or a message — they are plastic stars, and they pay for that. Bad things happen to these people, the A-class artists, they pay for it big time.”
Nahhas is deservedly proud, and not just of what she’s accomplished — four albums, sold-out concerts across the Middle East and Europe — but of how she did it. Inspired by the pure, uncompromised lineage of heroes such as Fayrouz and Julia Boutros, Nahhas earned an enviable reputation for rediscovering and reinterpreting Middle East folk songs, but today shares much of her fanbase with alternative indie acts. And she did it all without compromise. She might often speak dismissively of her more commercially minded contemporaries, but it never spills into arrogance; Nahhas simply has high standards — for herself, and everybody else.
“I have to feel something deeply inside me, so I can reflect it, truly and honestly. If I don’t feel the song, I don’t sing it,” she says, adding that this occasionally involves turning down “important” people. “I know the real thing. Even if it’s on a smaller scale, it will live longer, so I’m so happy with it, and I’m not going to change it. I have respect for myself.”
This brassy integrity has come to define her life and career, shaped by tackling social causes in song, performing benefit concerts and singing for displaced exiles and orphaned children. Her planned next single, “Tents,” is an ode to the region’s refugee camps, based on a poem by famed Syrian poet Hani Nadeem. After rejecting the work of four different writers, she put the verse to music herself.
“We can’t not relate to what’s happening around us, I can’t sing about (enjoying) life when there are bodies all over the Arab world. It’s not right,” she adds. “It’s really silly when you see other artists do a clip celebrating life in a silly way, because we’re not all doing this — come on, put your feet on the earth, you’re not coming from Venus. Like, one percent of the Arab world lives like this. I don’t want to sing for this — it would be fake.”
“Tents” will be the long-awaited follow-up to “Nour,” an acclaimed fourth album bathed in sympathetic folk-fusion arrangements, framing Nahhas’ new embrace of songwriting. Work is now underway on a fifth LP, and before that, on August 4, she closed Jordan’s Jerash Festival.
The concert marked a homecoming of sorts. It was her first performance on home soil in four years, and since becoming a mother — she was pregnant with her first son, Jude, during her last appearance at the festival in 2014, while daughter Sophie followed two years later. It also marked the closing of a circle: Jerash played host to her first major live performance, in 1997, at the age of 20.
Nahhas never planned on a stage career until, in her late teens, her grandfather encouraged her — against her better judgment — to enter a radio talent competition, a forerunner to shows such as “The Voice.”
The young Nahhas sang a Fayrouz song down the line to an answering machine, and forgot all about the experience until, three months later, her aunt spotted a newspaper ad hunting down the mysterious Macadi Nahhas — her family phone had been disconnected for the preceding months. She rushed to a neighbor’s house to call MBC back, and was invited to sing in the televised final round in Beirut.
Nahhas finished third, but the experience energized her to stay in Lebanon and study at the Conservatoire Libanais, where she met ambitious musicians from across the region and became politicized. She began performing at rallies, fundraisers and Palestinian refugee camps. Soon, while still a student, she was touring on bills alongside heroes including Marcel Khalife and Sami Hawwat.
Even coming from a liberal family, Nahhas encountered resistance. “My grandmother was like, ‘You’re going to be on TV? Shame on you,’” she remembers. “But my father was open — he was always fighting for people’s freedom.”
The support of her father, a politician and poet, was pivotal. He took out a loan to finance the recording of his daughter’s first album, 2003’s “Kan Ya Ma Kan,” a heartfelt collection of Iraqi folksongs recorded in pre-war Baghdad alongside members of the Iraqi National Orchestra, under the direction of long-term conductor Mohammed Amin Izzat.
“The musicians said to me, ‘Are you sure you want to do this old Iraqi music?’” she recalls. “‘You’re writing your story from the ending. You have to have a hit and then come and sing folksongs.’”
Its release was delayed in part because of the US invasion of Iraq. Nahhas eventually printed just 100 copies of the album to share with friends and family. However, her nostalgic celebration of the region’s shared cultural heritage became a surprise hit online, striking a chord both at home and with the far-flung Arab diaspora.
The follow-up, “KhilKhal,” released in 2006, elegantly embellished Arabic folksongs with fresh jazz and Latin flourishes, and Nahhas was thrust to regional prominence after being personally invited by Lebanese TV personality Zahi Wehbe to guest on his show “Khalik Bel Beit.” A year later, having been forced out of Beirut by the 2006 Lebanon War, she performed her first headline show at Jerash.
Back in Jordan, Nahhas began volunteering with an NGO working with disadvantaged children, an experience which inspired her third album “Jowwa Al Ahlam,” a collection of songs designed to offer grounding, comfort and positive messages to young lives, distributed to those in need.
It seems fitting that among her daily barrage of e-mails, Nahhas has received messages from several mothers telling how they have chosen to name their daughters in their honor. “So now there’s lots of little Macadis all over,” she says with a laugh. “This means more to me than anything — you change something in people’s lives, make them act a different way.”
Suddenly, Nahhas grows solemn, recalling the story of a Lebanese fan who told her he aborted a planned suicide after listening to her music. “I was like, ‘What? Why? What happened?’” she says. “He said, ‘One day I’ll tell you why, but now I can’t.’
“It’s amazing,” she continues. “I’m so grateful my songs reach the right people at the right moment.”
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