‘Ashes’ the popular Bangladesh band, started its official journey in 2008. Iffat Ara Munia catches up with Zunayed Evan, the lead vocalist of Ashes, who is also a writer, talked about its journey, from beginning to date, minority attacks, social charity, and so on.

Ashes drew public attention nationwide from its first album ‘Charpoka’. Though it started its journey in 2008 officially the main vocalist Zunayed Evan unofficially started it with two other band members Rafsan and Bijoy in 2005. Zunayed Evan said, “As a singer, frankly speaking, I have started my singing journey out of the adventure. Whenever I wanted to sing, I found a lot of background noise or couldn’t make attention, or couldn’t sing like I wanted to. From that, I started to run from home, tried to find a calm place in the forest for jamming with friends. This is how the journey has begun.”

Besides being a popular singer, Zunayed Evan is also a writer as well. In this pandemic, he writes a literature novel “Shesh”, that is published on Amar Ekushe Boimela (Book Fair) 2021. It becomes the country’s best-seller book and received a Best Seller Award from the country’s top online bookseller company Rokomari.com.  

During the pandemic, Evan penned this novel. He shared, “normally we (Ashes) spent quite a busy time before the pandemic for numerous concert shows. Even don’t get the quality time to spend on other things. So at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a novel. Then started to compose songs, released new songs. Last year this time we released a song, “Nijer Jonno”.”

“WE ARE RECENTLY GOING TO RELEASE A NEW SONG THAT IS ABOUT “AMI BODLE JABO”. IT MEANS “I WILL CHANGE”.

All the songs from Ashes are written and tuned by Zunayed Evan himself. Evan said when I started to write songs for the band I haven’t any idea it will impact the audience that much. But when now I hear from my audience it relates to them, they get healed from our songs. It means a lot.

Zunayed Evan is also involved in quite a few charity programs. Even Ashes have done more than a hundred music concerts for charity. They are still running this charity on. Evan said, “This feeling is something astonishing, fantastic, can’t describe in words. To help people by singing this feeling is really something unreal.”

Ashes going to collaborate with the Lalon band. It also going to collaborate another song with Chirkut’s vocalist Sumi. But when we ask about his dream collaboration he mentions the LRB’s founder ‘Ayub Bacchu’s name who passed away in 2018. He said if I ever get any chance to involve with him, at least a line to sing it would be a privilege for me.

Recently a minority attack happened on communal harmony. Zunayed Evan requested the mass people not to attack them. He urged, “we all are Bengali, we shouldn’t attack others based on religious facts. We all should live together with showing respect to other religions.”