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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne. When she was 18, Arush Aftub was living with her parents in Lahore, Pakistan.

She was recording music at home when, quite improbably, she had a hit.

A bare-bones, lo-fi interpretation of one of the most covered songs in history, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

The recording went viral, not in the way that we might mean now, because this was the early 2000s,

but the song got shared and shared and shared through email and apps like Napster and so forth.

And you know, it kick-started Arrush's career.

A year later, she moved to the United States to get a degree at the Berkeley School of Music.

There she focused on music production and engineering.

She graduated, moved to New York, started getting work scoring and editing films.

She had the beginnings of what was shaping up to be a solid, reliable career in music.

But Aftab's dream wasn't scoring indie dramas.

It wasn't recording whispery lo-fi covers of Leonard Cohen's songs, either.

She wanted to be a solo artist, a singer, producer, and composer.

She wanted to record music that evoked the country in which she grew up, and at the same time, it was fresh and new.

And so she did.

Mahabha was fresh and new. And so she did. That's Mohabit, a single from Arrugus' 2021 album, Vulture Prince.

Mohabit earned Offtab a Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance, making her the first ever

Pakistani to win a Grammy.

...