Roxane, In Her Own Terms

The Lebanese singer on leaving home, finding her language, and no longer asking permission.

Every artist has a version of themselves they used to be, and a version they're still becoming. Not all are able to speak about the distance between the two as plainly as this one does, without romanticizing it, without smoothing over the parts that took a while to work out. Talk to her for a while, and you’ll notice this makes for a rare kind of conversation: unguarded, but never careless.

Roxane is a Lebanese singer building a career between Dubai's gleaming infrastructure and the Middle East's deeply entrenched music industry. She talks about her own evolution with a dryness that doubles as armor, and a humor that doesn’t flinch from the weight of what it’s describing – the same clarity she brings to everything else. And it all comes from having spent a long time deciding, deliberately, which parts of herself she still owes an explanation for.

The House of Influences

Music in Roxane’s house was never a single thing. It was, by her account, a controlled chaos of influences – her mother cycling between powerhouse vocalists like Céline Dion, Shania Twain and Julia Boutros, her father firmly rooted in the rock scene of the 70s and 80s, her brother deep in a Michael Jackson obsession that never left. Into that mix, she carved out her own corner: R&B and soul, the female powerhouse inherited from her mother but redirected, with three CDs on permanent rotation: Destiny’s Child’s Destiny Fulfilled, Christina Aguilera’s Dirty, and Shakira’s Laundry Service.

Around 13 or 14, Roxane started singing alone in the house, only when everyone had left. Her brother already had the role of family musician – he played, he performed, he was the artist. The question of singing for Roxane was one she wasn’t sure how to approach. So, she didn’t tell anyone. For a few years, the strategy worked and the singing stayed between her and the empty house. Until her mother caught her at 16. Roxane’s mother had wanted to be an artist herself, a dream Roxane’s grandfather had refused. When she saw her daughter’s potential, she turned “full on momager,” as Roxane puts it. She was talking talent shows, platforms, opportunities, a lot of things which Roxane resisted heavily. To her, there was already a singer in the family. “But then she told me: you are your own person and singer. You need your own platform.” It was the first time someone handed Roxane some form of permission. “It wasn’t just that my parents allowed us to explore music as a hobby or art form, they allowed us to dream of it as a career. I credit my mom a lot for that.”

The stage fright lasted about a year. After that, she says, it was impossible to keep her off the stage.

A Country That Kept Saying ‘No

Roxane had always known, on some level, that Lebanon would not keep her. “My vision of life was always: I don't want to leave Lebanon, but I have to leave Lebanon,” she says, a clear-eyed reading of a country that had been slowly, then suddenly, making itself uninhabitable for the generation it should have been nurturing. When the political and economic crisis hit in 2019, she left for France. Then COVID happened, and France became six months of isolation, plans suspended. “I think everybody in their life has a shift from thinking ‘life is so beautiful and easy’ to ‘Oh my God, life is so hard.’ That’s when my shift happened. I now have to provide everything for myself. That was my rude awakening, I knew I had to get serious. And it kind of made me sour about Lebanon. I resented it for a long time, because I always felt pushed out.” On the other hand, it was also when something shifted creatively. Stripped of the noise of a life in motion, she started writing her own music for the first time. It turned out that exile had its own kind of productivity, not necessarily comfortable, but one that comes from having nothing left to distract you from what you actually have to say.

She came back to Beirut in July of 2020. On August 4th, the port exploded. “Oh wow,” she said, about the city she had already tried to leave twice. “You really don’t want me here, do you, universe?” Circumstances then doubled in hardship, and Roxane had to leave again. In the months that followed, as she began exploring opportunities in Dubai, she landed a job at a social media company, having studied media and communications. So she moved, and carried the music with her. By early 2021, Dubai was home. Or at least, it was becoming one. Roxane says her resentment toward Lebanon took years to process. Every time she looked for a reason to go back, a door closed. Every solution failed to pan out. She grieved it, resisted it, and eventually landed somewhere more complicated than either bitterness or acceptance. “I still don't see it as a place I can flourish in, unfortunately, and I'm sad about that. Hopefully, that will change one day.” she says. “But I can't, in good conscience, say that Dubai isn't my home. Because it is. It’s been a little over five years now. I set up my roots. I found a way to be a ‘big girl’ about life. Dubai offers me a quality of life for my work that I couldn’t have had in Lebanon. I have to see it that way, otherwise I'd go back to Lebanon and do nothing.” It’s a very Roxane kind of conclusion: honest to the point of being almost brutal, and entirely free of self-pity.

Found in Translation

Roxane’s first song was in English. It was simply who she was for a long time, having grown up with these influences. “I built my whole entire self on the fact that I am not a traditionally Arab person or woman,” she explains. “The way I present myself, my values, how I was raised, how I was exposed to the world.” Writing in Arabic felt, to her, like a contradiction of that self – a performance of roots she hadn't chosen to center, a concession to an industry that expected a certain kind of Arab woman artist and would slot her neatly into that category the moment she gave it the opening. “A part of me always felt like I'd be selling out if I did it in Arabic,” she admits. “It felt like a cop-out.” There was also a commercial reality she couldn't ignore. The Middle Eastern market is not generous to artists who insist on other languages. She was already niching herself, already narrowing the circle of people who could access what she was making. “That wasn’t my goal as an artist. I care about people listening to me. I care about people being interested in what I have to say. I care about people relating to me.” At some point, the question stopped being ideological and became practical: what if she just tried?

The answer surprised her. “I realized that my artist's voice sounded different in Arabic. What I had to say landed differently on people's ears, and on mine.” There were things she also simply could not say in English the way she could say them in her first language. “This is part of artistic exploration. I didn’t do it because people were expecting me to do it. I did it simply because I wanted to try. It gave me a challenge too, as opposed to English, which was very easy for me. But having to sit down and figure out how to say things in Arabic was entirely different.” None of this happened when she woke up one morning and decided to reconnect with her roots, Roxane is honest about that. The resistance loosened gradually and in increments she learned to trust. Her cousin Aleks became her co-writer. Her family became a sounding board – translators, art directors, fellow songwriters, people invested in helping her find her voice. Then, later on, came a milestone that reframed everything. “I took a pen and paper and word-vomited in Arabic,” she says of writing one of her upcoming songs, she who was used to having notes and paragraphs of things she wants to say in English. “So now, not only am I singing in Arabic, but I’m also thinking in Arabic, I’m feeling in Arabic. And it’s a great feeling.”

Ask Roxane to describe her sound and she'll tell you, with characteristic directness, that the “official answer” is Arabic Pop/R&B. Then she’ll immediately flag the inadequacy of that label. “There are so many subgenres,” she says. “But if I keep saying Pop or R&B, it's still a little westernized. I don't feel like it's enough to put the word 'Arabic' next to it.” In the meantime, she has her own working definition: “I don’t know if, with time, there will be a better word coined to give us all a place to shelter – me and all of the other artists in the region. I make sexy Arabic music,” she says with a smile. “That's what it is. Can't tell you otherwise.”

The music gets made the way it gets made, which is to say: on its own terms, and not on a schedule. Roxane does not force it. She has no set time to write, no ritual that reliably opens the tap. Something catches her ear, a chord progression, a beat, an experience that needs time to settle before she can approach it, and she follows it. “I learned to respect whatever comes out,” she says. “Even if I have a plan in mind and something else comes up during the writing, I let it. I'll go with it to the end, and then if I don't like it, I won't use it. One thing about me is that, if I’m feeling too emotional or overwhelmed, those will not be the times where I feel like writing. When I’m devastated, everything is on pause. The only thing on the schedule in those moments in devastation. And then, when time passes, I can look back at the situation and tap into the devastation without it consuming me.” It’s a disciplined relationship with her own emotions, and it shows in the work: every song she has released is, by her own account, a song she loves. There

are no “fillers” in her catalogue. Once a song has a solid draft, it goes to a producer – a back-and forth process she is fully present for. The collaboration matters to her. So does the pace, even when the pace frustrates her. “I'm not in a position to always have free time,” she says, “which is a little frustrating but still okay.” She has learned, like she has learned most things, to work within the conditions she actually has rather than the ideal ones she'd prefer.

The Body of Work

Roxane's EP NAJMA, which contains the tracks “Hezzi,” “Come Down,” “Najma,” and “Haram,” was built around a question most artists spend their careers avoiding rather than interrogating head-on: what do you do with shame? The body of work took the seven sins as its scaffolding, each song working through a different facet of it – sin, identity, and carrying both while being a woman, and an Arab woman specifically. “All of the songs were mostly about an aspect of my ‘sinning’ that I had to come to terms with throughout my life,” she says, “and accept that shame, accept that it's a part of living, of being a woman, of being Arab.”

What makes the project distinct isn't the theme itself, it’s what Roxane refused to do with it. Shame, usually, gets treated as something to mourn, confess, or atone for on record. Roxane wanted the opposite. “How can I make shame sound fun?" she says. “Because it's heavy on you, it prohibits you from feeling that openness of life, that sense of peace within yourself. I don't want to emulate the darkness of shame, we already have that. So I did my best to make it fun.” Roxane insists NAJMA was an important project for her because it helped her scratch that itch of laying it all bare. She also talks about the title track “Najma” with a bittersweet feeling. It's the song that put her on the map, the one she's grateful for and still, somehow, protective of. “I still feel like it’s an underdog,” she says. “I want more for it. I want more people to experience it.”

Another track that means a lot to Roxane would be “ENSA,” her latest release, which she dubs as unintentional. She had traveled to Lebanon to perform and do a writing camp with her cousin Aleks – her favorite person to write with, the same cousin who'd become her closest collaborator in Arabic. She got sick. The performance fell through. The camp didn't. For three days, the routine was reduced to essentials: eat, sleep, write, repeat. “ENSA” happened in the middle of all that. It wasn't just another song, and while not being fully in Arabic, it was the most Arabic song she had made, the one where she finally heard, without hesitation, that everything she'd been trying to translate from English could also exist, fully and natively, in her first language.

Post-“ENSA” Roxane

Roxane has a name for the person she used to be: pre-“ENSA” Roxane. That version of her wanted the same things for her audience now: to feel empowered, capable, free. But she had wanted it loudly. Daringly. “It was encouraging people to challenge someone or something, because more often than not, on the other side lies something that you want to do.” Post-“ENSA” Roxane wants the exact same outcome, but she's stopped shouting to get there. The shift, in her words, comes down to a single distinction: permission. “Pre-‘ENSA’ Roxane would have told you to ask for permission and then do whatever you want,” she says. “Post-‘ENSA’ Roxane is telling you: don't ask for permission, do whatever you want, but be smart about it.”

Roxane had built her entire artistic persona around rebelling, and that rebellion, she says plainly, “has cost me. A lot.” Growing up, evolving, has meant going back through her own decisions and separating the ones she made because she genuinely wanted to from the ones she made simply to prove that she could. The reckoning is also industry-specific. She lives in the Gulf. She works in a region, and a sub-industry, dominated by men – the most successful indie Arabic artists, she points out, are almost uniformly men. Arriving in that space and expecting people to simply make room because she demands it was never going to work, and she knows it. “I'm smart about it now,” she says. “Otherwise, I won't get the opportunities I want. The world is not evolving as quickly as I want. It has not changed. It will not change. Either you find your place in it and you accommodate without losing yourself entirely, or you're going to keep fighting an uphill battle. And I'm sick of fighting. I'm not going to put any more obstacles in my own way just to prove a point to people that are never going to change.” She isn't waiting for the industry to catch up to her anymore. She's already moved. “I'm speaking the language, while protecting myself.”

Essence Over Everything

The new songs Roxane is working on now are headed somewhere else entirely. Not a different person, she's careful to clarify, just a different register of the same one. “Essence-wise, I am still the same person,” she says. “I just don't feel the need to prove how badass I am anymore.” There were stretches of her path where breaking the rules, saying things an Arab woman wasn't supposed to say, felt non-negotiable. Today, she feels that this essence will project regardless of whether she pushes it to the surface, because it's already in her. She also thinks about it from a listener's point of view, and what she hopes for is precise: that people come to appreciate her essence more than they appreciate the product of her essence. “The essence will never change,” she says. “But the presentation and packaging of it will definitely change.”

Beyond that, she isn't promising anything. Right now, she's in the mode where the itch is to get back on a stage. The plans she once had for her next body of work didn't survive contact with reality – money, time, resources all in shorter supply than ambition. “You know they say God looks at your plans and laughs,” she says. “Well, he cackled at mine.” She isn't waiting for ideal conditions anymore. Another EP, eventually an album, they'll come, on her terms, whenever circumstances truly allow it. The sound will shift, the way it already has – from loud to quiet, from asking to simply doing. But underneath all of it is still the same person: the girl singing alone in an empty house, the woman who rebuilt somewhere she didn't choose, the artist who finally stopped waiting for the universe to let her back in.