Dawn Images

Singer Natasha Noorani is the female voice and perspective that Pakistan's mainstream music had been sorely lacking for a while. Her song 'Choro' was a favourite for weeks after its release in May, and she recently explained what the song means to her.

Noorani broke into mainstream music after she sang 'Baby Baby' on Velo Sound Station in 2020. She was well-known among local music enthusiasts well before this as she was the co-director of one of Pakistan’s most important music festivals, the Lahore Music Meet.

In an interview with Popshift, Noorani highlighted why she felt inclined to write 'Choro' in the first place. "I wrote this song two years ago in my dorm room while I was going through [a heartbreak], she said. "[The song] took its time to come to fruition in terms of me having performed it a bunch live and sharing multiple recordings and then finally finding Abdullah Siddiqui who was the perfect producer to handle this."

'Choro' was a song meant to heal some of the singer's wounds after a painful end to a relationship. "I don't think every heartbreak or loss leads to some kind of closure," she said. "So this song for me served as that moment of wrapping things up and shoving it aside in a box".

Noorani also touched upon how the music video for the song represents the meaning and emotions behind the song. "I think every set of the video was designed to represent a moment in that attempt at closure, or an attempt to leave a situation that is rough and difficult," Noorani said. "The swing set represents this oscillation between yes and no. The cotton-candy set reveals a dream-like state. The threads obviously represent entanglement.

"Each scene has a lot of metaphor in it, but it is also for whoever is watching to make what they want to out of it," the singer emphasised.

At this point in the interview, Noorani deep dived into giving viewers a line by line explanation of the song lyrics, singing out chunks of the song and then explaining them one after the other. "Socho hum bhi they udaas, key dono key beech waadi ban gaye," she sang the intro. "So this verse is basically the start of a conversation. I don't know whether this is between me and another person. I like to think this is between me and myself because [the situation is] a conflict within the heart.

"The lyrics are addressing the fact that there is so much distance between entities, there's no denying it anymore that this is it," she continued. "It can't get worse than this so "waadi ban gaye" means that there is such a mass of land between us, there's a valley between us," she said.

"Socho hum bhi they naraz, key dhokon key hee hum adi ban gaye," the singer sang, explaining that the line is anger. "Lots of rage in that moment where you don't want to be kind to the other person. You just want to snap at them so this is me [in the song] throwing some amount of shade [at them]."

Excitingly, Noorani also gave some insight into what the catchy chorus of the song is all about. "The chorus is basically the plea," she said. "I'm both talking to myself and to this other person to just say 'let's run from this and let's break this off'. This toxicity isn't good for both of us and it's just me saying that I'm literally drowning in fire.

"This metaphor made the most amount of sense because you feel so submerged. You're sinking, you're drowning but because there's also so much anger in rage that both those sensations are present, drowning and being on fire," she explained.

While we hear a lot of music, rarely do we hear the artists themselves breaking down the songs for their listeners. It was definitely interesting to hear the thought process behind 'Choro', a song that had been stuck in our heads for most of the summer. You can watch the complete explanation in the video on Popshift's YouTube channel.