“What About Heaven” by Mustafa

The 2021 album “When Smoke Rises,” from 24-year-old poet and singer/songwriter Mustafa, is a collection of songs memorializing friends and community members lost to violence. Mustafa’s mourning moves in ripples through his music, from the pain of losing a close friend to the weight of witnessing larger patterns of loss. The song “What About Heaven” is one of the album’s most powerful tracks, an ethereal lament in which Mustafa wonders about a dead friend’s fate.

“What About Heaven” features little more than a simple guitar line and Mustafa’s smooth, whispering croon. His voice falls effortlessly across the notes like water, soft in a way that makes listening feel intimate. The song makes use of its empty space, leaving a kind of gentle desolation in its silences. Sparse percussion and samples of Egyptian and Sudanese traditional music filter in and out of these spaces.

We forgot to talk about Heaven
And leaving
And what it would mean
And how I would grieve
What about Heaven?
What about Heaven?

All the pretty girls
Their hair, their fashion
The words that we’d say if we walked past them
Our lives and our art and how we would craft them
Complaining for hours and hours and hours of lovers and friends
That never even mattered
None of it even mattered

This repeated chorus, the refrain of “we forgot to,” captures the kind of quiet, clinging despair that can be felt after sudden loss. It’s the feeling that something has been left unfinished, that there was something we could have said or done that would have made things right. The anxiety in this question builds through the song, culminating in the last line: “What if you’re not forgiven?”

Mustafa
Samuel Engelking via Rolling Stone

If the grief in “What About Heaven” feels fresh; however, it also feels weary. In interviews, Mustafa has spoken about the toll taken by violence and structural injustice on his community and his own psyche. A practicing Muslim born to Sudanese immigrants, Mustafa is an activist and peacemaker in his home city of Toronto. Emerging in the creative scene in his teens as a spoken-word poet and social justice advocate, Mustafa was appointed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Youth Council when he was 20 years old.

Although Mustafa already has numerous songwriting credits to his name, “When Smoke Rises” is his first solo album. The young artist has already achieved widespread critical acclaim for the debut, and in May he performed “What About Heaven” live for the first time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Kimmel. You can watch his performance below.