Music had been part of Yamane’s life long before it became her profession. It was in the instruments she learned, in the songs she grew up hearing and, most importantly, in the musical legacy of her mother, Lebanese singer Fadia Tomb El-Hage.
“I consider myself very lucky that music kind of came to me,” she says. “I was completely immersed from a very early age – listening to CDs at home, hearing my mother and family sing or going to concerts across Lebanon.” She began learning violin at five, piano at 12 and guitar at 15. “It’s always been part of me, like second nature,” she says.
After school, she studied medicine for four years before ultimately choosing to pursue her passion instead – music. Since making that decision seven years ago, the Lebanese singer has been constantly evolving. In 2019, she reached the semi-finals of Season 5 of The Voice, becoming the first contestant performing in English to reach that stage in an Arab-singing competition. She then moved to Dubai in 2021 to devote herself full-time to music and, two years later, launched her first original track, “90’s Kid”.
Along the way, she embraced the challenges involved in developing a successful music career. While the art of performance is important, there is also the more demanding daily grind of writing, practicing and figuring out how to keep going when your work has yet to reach an audience.
“You have to treat your talent like a career, not a hobby,” she says. It is a deceptively simple distinction. Talent is often considered as something innate, but for someone who spent years between two demanding worlds, the lesson is clear: “You cannot build your life around something that does not feel like yours”.
Last month marked a significant turning point for the singer when she was selected as the first artist for Anghami’s Sawt Jdeed program. Her daily streams on the platform increased almost 300-fold and her weekly unique listeners rose by 160 per cent, building further on the momentum she had earned to date. Listeners didn’t just stop at the tracks that introduced her; they also dived deeper into her wider catalogue, which substantially increased her streams.
Keeping fresh and creative is also key to musical longevity. In a recent series of social media videos, Yamane showcased her talent while satisfying the algorithm’s appetite for short-form content. In them, she builds a song from scratch, moving between instruments and stages of the arrangement before compressing the entire process into roughly three minutes. The idea behind her videos is surprisingly old-fashioned: let people see the craft. Rather than reducing musicianship to content, she uses content to make musicianship accessible.
This approach – where craft informs content – also runs through her relationship with her mother. The two recently revisited Mourafrifoul Dalali (مرفرف الدلال), an older song that Yamane’s mother used to sing as a child. The mother-daughter duet went viral, introducing the song to a whole new audience/generation of Lebanese music fans.
Yamane is also set to perform Mourafrifoul Dalali at her upcoming concert on 9 September. It seems fitting that the song should find its way back in her setlist. What was once part of her mother’s childhood now belongs, in a different form, to her repertoire.
For aspiring young artists looking to follow in her footsteps, she offers this advice: “Practice more than you think you need to. Learn the unglamorous parts of the craft – the writing, the arranging, the constant self-editing. Build a life around music that can stand on ordinary days, not just on the high of a performance”.
Yamane’s journey, ultimately, is about having the courage to recognise what is worth building and finding the discipline it takes to build it. For those artists still wondering whether their talent can become a life, her answer is simple: take it seriously enough to find out.
