Bahjat Alturjman

Episode: 22 — "Discover Yourself" · Full Episode #22

Date: 19 May 2020 (Season 3)

Language: Libyan Arabic and English

Recorded in: Remote (Sweden / London)

Who He Is

Bahjat Alturjman (بهجت الترجمان) is a Libyan pop singer-songwriter with multi-million streams on Spotify. He is known for releasing "Iji Kiyom" (2020), the first pop song he wrote and recorded in the Libyan dialect after a career spent almost entirely in English. Born in Libya, he was raised in Malta from childhood and later moved to Sweden to pursue pop songwriting formally.

What He Shared

The Empty Fridge

In 2011 the family's flow of money from Libya stopped. Living in Malta, they reached a point at which the fridge was empty and still running. His parents unplugged it to save electricity. Alturjman describes the moment as a choice point: despair at the bottom or treat it as an opportunity to rebuild. He framed it as the cleanest reset of his life.

See: The Empty Fridge

Chasing Max Martin

As a teenager, Alturjman read an article mentioning that Swedish producer Max Martin had visited a pop music academy in Piteå, in northern Sweden. Alturjman emailed the school after the application deadline had passed. He was accepted. During his time there, Max Martin unexpectedly appeared at the academy, and Alturjman met him eye-to-eye.

See: Chasing Max Martin

The YouTube Strategy at Fifteen

Before algorithmic discovery existed, the 15-year-old Alturjman would manually add 1,000 YouTube users a day with personal comments, building a subscriber base by brute force. He would walk to a CD shop in Malta every week to see how many copies of each new Taylor Swift album had been sold, treating the shop as his research tool.

Writing in Arabic for the First Time

"Iji Kiyom" was the first song Alturjman wrote in Arabic. He recorded the first vocal takes by humming into the microphone, embarrassed by the sound of his own language on a pop song — a hangover from his teenage sense that Arabic music was not "cool." He forced himself through it.

Paid to Sing at Cousins' Birthdays

As a shy child, his mother would pay him a small amount to sing at family birthdays. Alturjman credits the arrangement as unintentional but effective stage training — a way of practising performance for a guaranteed, fixed fee before any real audience.

Key Themes

• Arabic identity arriving late in an otherwise Western-raised artist
• Manual-craft strategy in a pre-algorithm music industry
• Poverty as creative reset
• The immigrant ceiling broken by cold emails
• Performance as a learned — not innate — skill

Stories

• The Empty Fridge — A Maltese kitchen, 2011, and the moment a family unplugged an empty fridge
• Chasing Max Martin — An after-deadline email that became an eye-to-eye meeting in a Swedish pop academy

Quotes

"When there's nothing left in the fridge, you might as well unplug it. And once you've unplugged it, you might as well start again." (EP 22)

"I hummed the first Arabic song into the mic because my ego was too fragile to hear it out loud." (EP 22)