Ardalan Sarfaraz
Ardalan Sarfaraz is one of the central lyricists of Iranian pop, of the generation of Shahyar Ghanbari and Iraj Jannati Atai. He wrote for Googoosh, Dariush, Sattar and Hayedeh, and his ear was for the way Tehran actually spoke: vaseh over barayeh, dooneh over daneh. Persian songwriting had centuries of formal poetry behind it and could be stubborn about register; his lines read as said rather than composed, which made them sound less arranged than the older songs and more inevitable.
The Soghati credit line - words by Sarfaraz, music by Mohammad Heydari, voice by Hayedeh - is one working unit from a larger system, and Sarfaraz sat at the center of it for a generation: the same pen behind songs for Googoosh, Dariush, Sattar and Hayedeh, set by the era's composers, Heydari among them. Two collections of his lyrics were later published as books, Az Risheh ta Hamisheh and Sal-e Sefr - which is its own kind of statement: song words that could stand on the page without their melodies. He has lived outside Iran since the years after the revolution, and the ghorbat, the being-elsewhere, is legible in the later work; it is part of why Soghati, written before the scattering, can sound as if it saw the scattering coming.
