Strings discuss their newest music video, the experience of working with director Yasir Jaswal and keeping up with the digital age.
Pakistan’s longest running music group Strings, since making the announcement earlier this year that they plan to release eight new songs, each accompanied by its own music video, have been diligently working in the studio. Having made their departure from Coke Studio last year after producing four seasons, Bilal Maqsood and Faisal Kapadia’s only focus now is on their own brand of music.
A glimpse of what they’re feeling and what they plan to unveil in terms of content as they celebrate 30 years as a band with an extensive body of work, can be seen and heard in their first release from those eight singles, the warm and colorful ‘Sajni’.
The music video is directed by Yasir Jaswal and features Bilal as a therapist and Faisal as a patient whose neon dreams form the crux of the video.
Apart from being a light, lovely song that emits warmth, it is a track that marks the first release from the band’s sixth album, 30. Instead of dropping the record as a whole, something they’ve done in the past with great success, they plan to release one song per month given the digital times we live in. Though the song stays true to the Strings sound, it is also a neon dream, both visually and sonically. It’s almost as if the band knows that it’s coming back rejuvenated and that awareness has translated into incredible energy.
“We had a great time shooting this video,” says Bilal Maqsood while discussing ‘Sajni’. “We knew that Yasir’s videos are colorful. This song, we wanted to do with Yasir, and we asked him and he said yes. We brainstormed, he shared some ideas and we shared some as well. He was very methodical in his approach. We shot this video in a day. We had four sets and while we were working on one set, another set was being worked on. We’d be finished with one and the next one would be ready. That’s how his team was working.”
Adds Faisal: “And it wasn’t as if the shoot ended in the middle of the night, at 2: 00 am or something like that. It was done by 11: 30 pm by night and we were very impressed.”
As for the context of ‘Sajni’, it is, as Bilal puts it, a light, love song and one that depicts the mental space the band is currently in. “Right now the space we’re in, we’ve never felt lighter and happier and it reflects in ‘Sajni’; it’s a happy, energetic feel-good love song. It’s slightly comic. The songs we’re making now, we’re trying to explore the eighties and ‘Sajni’ is that exploration as well.”
Strings have always made iconic music videos but for the first time since starting out, they know that their music videos may not get air-time. It is a far cry from the days when they began their journey in the eighties.
“We do miss that era,” confesses Bilal, “but we have to adapt no matter how difficult it may seem. Faisal is the guru of social media and keeps looking at how things should be done. I have very little knowledge. But for us, right now, it’s trial and error. We’ll release music videos and we’ll learn along the way about what worked and what didn’t. If you go to morning shows you have to do things you don’t want to do. You may have to play a game or cook something and we want to avoid all this. News channels don’t need songs and music channels don’t exist so TV is not there and it’s either gigs or YouTube, etc.”
As Faisal sees it, in some ways this situation will bring some older trends back in play. “We’ll go back to old times when bands would promote new material at concerts. They’d sing new songs and that’s how people would learn about them. The age of Indus Music, when one song would come on TV and by the next day everyone would know about it, is over but as Bilal said, these are all learnings and we’ll only learn if we do it and make that effort. Our priority is to somehow increase the reach of this music. How we do that is something we’re figuring out and trying.”
