By Lauren Mechling
It’s been a mega summer for Rahill Jamalifard. The musician has been DJing at dance parties up and down the Hudson Valley; touring with Habibi, the psychedelic girl group she co-founded in 2011; and recording her second solo album.
And, on Tuesday nights, you can find her playing soccer at a school field in Chatham, New York, with “the guys,” a ragtag crew of men she just about killed herself rounding up.
“A good game is at least 6 vs. 6, so you need 12 people,” she says. It took serious wrangling to secure what she calls a “selective crew of the best”—players from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Argentina. “It wasn’t easy to get them to commit, but I begged and begged,” she says. “So you can see why I’m feeling triumphant.”
“I’m a die-hard jock,” the 41-year-old former high school soccer star says from her home in New Lebanon. “My flow state happens in soccer more than anywhere else.”
It’s a little past noon on a Wednesday, and she’s seated at the breakfast nook in the kitchen she shares with her partner, Justus Kempthorne, a carpenter and artist. She claims to have a bruise from her Monday night game, but we’re on Zoom, so I can’t verify this. I can see that she is petite, and when she is thinking, she gathers her long dark hair and her necklace becomes visible. It’s the same coin-shaped pendant that her grandmother gave her as a baby and that appears on the cover of her debut solo album, “Flowers at Your Feet.”
Jamalifard grew up in Lansing, Michigan, the daughter of first-generation Iranian Muslim immigrants. She wanted to study art at Cooper Union, but knew her parents wouldn’t be thrilled with that. So she ended up at Michigan State, not making art but studying art history. After college, she accepted a ride with a friend driving to New York City. “Something was just pulling me there,” she says. “As a child we used to travel to Iran, but I didn’t even see the ocean for the first time until I was, like, 16.”
Multihyphenate Jamalifard color-coordinates with her Snoopy notebook; the musician with her Tuesday night soccer crew; a DJ session at Hy’s Fried, the recently shuttered Egremont joint.
The plan, such as it was, was to get settled and enroll in social work school at Hunter College. “But New York felt good,” she says, with a shrug that contains a whole life. So she found other ways to stay busy—waitressing, making music, learning the city.
It was in New York where she started Habibi, along with her childhood friend Lenny Lynch, whom Jamalifard calls “a white girl who is a secret Arab” and who now lives in Red Hook. “The rest of the band were Jewish New York girls,” she says. “Sometimes I wonder if we’re going to get in major trouble, since none of us is Arab—but Iranians call each other ‘habibi’ all the time.”
Habibi the band, which takes its name from the Arabic term of endearment, is known for its catchy, sunny take on surf rock, drawing from the same pentatonic scale as Arabic music. Dick Dale, the inventor of surf rock, was of Lebanese descent.
In song, Jamalifard vacillates from coolly lackadaisical to genuinely bewitching. The solo work she has been focusing on is more intimate and strange than Habibi’s bops. There’s an aspect of the sonic Pinterest board to it, layered with “field recordings” she captures throughout her daily life.
She saves snippets of text in a notebook or on her phone. “I’m always writing down ideas and new recommendations,” she says. Her inspiration ranges from Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novella “The Hearing Trumpet” to British murder mysteries, from obscure music tracks to Addison Rae and Justin Bieber.
“Note to Self,” a stunning and sad composition on her solo album, places the lyrics “I give advice so just take it / If you’re gonna make something make it / Don’t hesitate it / Not complicated / I’ve seen lights fall from sight / So many faded” against a peppy-tempoed chorus: “Put it in a note to self / Could’ve been a note to self / Must have been a note to self / Found it in a note to self.”
Two other standouts are “Futbol”—a lush spiritual tribute to the sport—“Fear comes rushing in now / And if you fall there’ll be angels to catch you / Hands from above nobody can match”—and “Fables,” which features backing vocals by Beck. It’s a perfect little bop.
She recently learned about another artist from two teenage girls she spotted in a parking lot by a thrift store. Jamalifard noticed them in a car, windows down, music loud—waiting for the song to end before they got out. “There was something about the song,” she says. She made a quick recording on her phone, drove home, and ran the forensics: the song was “Behind the Sun” by electronica duo Odesza. The sample loop, she discovered, was lifted from a recording by Simin Ghanem, a classical Iranian singer from the 1960s and ’70s that Jamalifard grew up listening to. “I never thought of myself as an electronica fan,” she says, “but everything evolves.”
