The Music On This Show Is Great — For 1 Particular Reason
Growing up, “We Are Lady Parts” creator Nida Manzoor would have jam sessions with her sister, Sanya, and brother, Shez.
“One of us would come into the other one’s bedroom and be like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this idea for a song.’ And Sanya, my sister, would start harmonizing, and my brother would start playing the guitar,” Manzoor told me in a recent interview.
As adults, they still work the same way, as collaborators on the music for “We Are Lady Parts.” Now in its second season on Peacock, the bold and buoyant comedy series follows the members of Lady Parts, a punk band composed entirely of Muslim women: Amina (Anjana Vasan), Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), Ayesha (Juliette Motamed) and Bisma (Faith Omole), as well as their manager, Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse). Naturally, the band’s music plays a central role in the show, and, thanks to Manzoor and her siblings, Lady Parts’ songs are extremely rad. (Shez, a composer, also scored Manzoor’s 2023 film, “Polite Society.”)
In composing the songs together, it was a return to the “organic” way they would write music during childhood, as Manzoor explained. “We had a week in a studio here in Bristol, where I live, and my siblings came and stayed over.”
Manzoor would come in with a song title or style in mind. “And then, we would just brainstorm ideas, lyric ideas, and then my brother would pick up the guitar, and then we would just start jamming and singing, and then we’d start writing. We’d write a song every day and then sort of move on. And we didn’t overthink it as well. We weren’t like, ‘This has gotta outdo Season 1.’ We just followed the vibe, and we were like, ‘This is cool. All right. That’s a song.’ There was not a lot of pressure on it. I think it was just ’cause it felt like we were just kids in our bedroom again. It felt very free and relaxed.”
Despite the siblings’ low-pressure approach, the songs — like much of the season as a whole — do feel bigger and bolder than in the first season, something the show’s cast encountered when learning them before filming.
“All the actors said that these songs this season are so much harder than [the songs in] Season 1. They’re way more intricate harmonies, way harder to play,” Manzoor said. “So the actors were really freaking out, but my brother really coached them through all that.”
In addition to the original songs performed by the band, the show’s new season features several showstopping covers, including Bisma’s powerful rendition of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” in Episode 4. It’s one of several great needle drops this season that were natural song choices to Manzoor, who drew a lot from the songs that have inspired her work and served as a soundtrack while she was writing the show.
“That Nina Simone song has always been in my sort of Lady Parts playlist since before I even wrote the pilot,” Manzoor said. “‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,’ it just really resonated with me as someone trying to express a certain aspect of identity whilst not always pleasing everyone. And I’ve never heard a song that speaks to that.”
“When I’m writing, I’m just open to songs that enter my orbit in a way, which sounds very woo-woo and annoying,” she added. “But with that song, I was with my producer, and we were at a festival, at Glastonbury Music Festival, ’cause ‘Polite [Society]’ was screened there, so we got free tickets. So we were watching Cat Stevens, [aka] Yusuf Islam. Watching Yusuf Islam, I’m like, ‘I need a Yusuf Islam song in my show,’ ’cause all his songs are so beautiful. I was sobbing, ’cause these are songs that I grew up with. And then he did the Nina Simone cover, which had always been in the back of my mind, and I just turned to John, my producer. I’m like, ‘Bisma should sing this, right?’ And he’s, like, ‘Yeah.’ It kind of came out of that, although it had been in my subconscious.”
On a very different tonal note from Nina Simone, Hoobastank’s “The Reason” punctuates a lot of the romantic arc between Amina and will-they-won’t-they love interest Ahsan (Zaqi Ismail). Ahsan includes the song on a mixtape for her. During a rom-com moment at the end of the season, Amina performs the song outside his window, “Say Anything”-style. Manzoor credits her sister, Sanya, with the song choice. When she suggested it, Manzoor immediately thought it was “so good and ridiculous and cringe and cheesy and perfect,” she said.
Another fun cover moment happens in the season’s third episode, when the members of Lady Parts, clad in matching dark suits, perform a medley of Britney Spears songs for a gig at a wedding.
“I think I’d always wanted to do a Britney cover for Lady Parts for some reason — like, why not? Britney’s amazing,” Manzoor said. “And I just wanted to see them all looking amazing in suits and playing Britney — just the contradiction of that was really exciting to me.”
According to Manzoor, the music from Season 2 will be released on a soundtrack album — including a special version on vinyl. Aside from the show’s original songs and covers, Manzoor said she is especially happy to “get to feature some artists that I was listening to as I was writing the show,” particularly undersung Muslim artists.
“In Episode 6, Saira discovers all these different artists, and those were all musicians I was actually really listening to as I was writing the show,” she said. “So we have Elaha Soroor, who is an Afghani musician who had to flee Afghanistan because of the Taliban. And we have Rasha Nahas, who is incredible. All these musicians were people I was listening to and enjoying as I was writing. So then getting to showcase them because they’re not super mainstream was really fun as well, as well as doing all the fun covers.”
“We Are Lady Parts” is now streaming on Peacock.
