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Do you think rejection ever informed how you approached making music? 

When I first started making music back in Malaysia, I had a huge local fan base. I was the biggest young artist in Malaysia. It was very overwhelming to deal with the fame. I hadn’t been trained to handle it, I just wrote a song, it became huge, and I started performing everywhere. I came up at the beginning of the social media era. A lot of the comments I received on Facebook and YouTube were constructive criticism. I tried not to take them personally, and instead think about how they could add to the quality of my music. I’m constantly learning and constantly exploring how to make music in new ways. I strive to be someone who is always evolving.

At that time, social media was much more community based. From a fan’s perspective, there was a novelty with MySpace—you felt like you were putting your followers on to a song you loved when they visited your page. Now, social media feels very saturated. As a result, some people no longer treat artists like they’re human.

That’s spot on. After the pandemic, I felt like I was searching for myself again. What do I want to do? How can I exist in the social media world when I’m not built for it? I’m not a TikTok star. As an independent artist, how can I still cater to my audience? I started a subscription-based club for my fans, who call themselves Yunationals, where they get to see behind-the-scenes footage. It’s a different way of sharing instead of putting everything on YouTube and having hundreds of thousands of people critique everything that I do. My real fans don’t say these things, so I decided to start a community on my website and on Discord. It’s great for my mental health.

When I think about women songwriters, particularly those from marginalized groups, so much of their writing has to disrupt what we are told in society. Do you feel like you get a lot of pushback from your songs that disrupt how people typically speak about Muslim women? 

I got a lot of support from the Muslim community, because they see this as an act of bravery. They’re like: “Wow, she’s actually talking about having a boyfriend?” I’m married now, but I’m still talking about real feelings. Muslim women aren’t robots. Girls from the Muslim community appreciate me drawing attention to that. I approach my writing as a real person, rather than thinking: “What should I say as a Muslim woman?” You shouldn’t be too calculated when you’re writing songs.

As a writer myself, I know that it can be difficult to articulate emotions that society hasn’t given you space to fully process. 

It’s important to me to continue writing like I’m that 18-year-old girl in her bedroom and no one knows what I’m doing. When I first moved to America, I tried to write a love song. I had a very traumatic break-up with my ex-boyfriend at the time, and I wanted to write about it, but at the time I wasn’t sure whether I should put personal experiences into my music. Fifty percent of me wanted to write about it, the other half thought I shouldn’t.

This feeling is rooted in generational trauma from the women in my family and my community. They’re always thinking: “What will people say?” In Malaysia, a lot of people are more unhappy with the way I dress than they are with my music. For over ten years, the biggest issue people have had with me is that I don’t cover my neck.