Faheem Abdullah Announces 'The Unbecoming Tour', His First Run Of Shows Across India
After 'Saiyaara' took him to the top of global streaming charts, the Srinagar singer-songwriter plays six cities in November and December with a stripped-back set.
Faheem Abdullah built his audience almost entirely on recordings. Now the Srinagar singer-songwriter is taking those songs on the road for the first time. The Unbecoming Tour, his debut national tour, opens in New Delhi on 20 November and closes in Mumbai on 27 December.
Team Innovation is producing and promoting the six-city run, with stops in Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad in between. Tickets are sold only on thumpN, with general sales having opened on 5 September.
Small rooms, by design
The shows are not being sold as spectacle. The tour is built around acoustic arrangements, storytelling between songs and the quieter emotional pull of his writing.
"I think this new chapter is about stripping away the formal identity of being an artist and unlearning everything the industry expects of me," Abdullah said in a statement. He said he wanted the concerts "to feel like a sanctuary".
That fits the songs. Abdullah draws on indie folk, contemporary rock and the ghazal, and writes largely in Urdu and Kashmiri. The acoustic material that first won him listeners carries the sound of home.
From 'Ishq' to 'Saiyaara'
His early following came through "Ishq", from the album Lost;Found, and "Hoor", which he performed on Coke Studio Bharat. Film work followed, first "Chand Mera Dil" and then "Saiyaara".
"Saiyaara" changed the scale of everything. It went to No. 1 on Spotify's Global Top 50 and into the top 10 of the Billboard Global 200, the first Hindi-language song to get that high on that chart. A song by an artist who had never toured nationally suddenly had listeners all over the world.
Team Innovation founder Mohit Bijlani described Abdullah as an artist "commanding a fiercely loyal community" and said his tour showed that independent music had become "a commercially viable headline act".
The real test
Plenty of streaming breakouts struggle on stage, where there is no studio polish to lean on. Abdullah's choice of an intimate, acoustic format is a smart way round that, because it plays to the qualities that made people care in the first place. It also keeps the production simple for a first outing.
Dates
- New Delhi, 20 November
- Kolkata, 22 November
- Pune, 4 December
- Ahmedabad, 6 December
- Hyderabad, 18 December
- Mumbai, 27 December
(Source: Team Innovation press release)
