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Meet Tiara, a multilingual Arab artist based in Dubai
The Lebanese singer opens up about performing at Jeddah E-Prix, industry setbacks, and building her sound in Dubai
- PUBLISHED: Tue 17 Feb 2026, 9:26 PM
There’s a version of the music industry we all see on Instagram: festival stages, glossy visuals, stream counts climbing in neat little milestones. And then there’s the part no one posts about: the wrong contracts, the creative restrictions, the “you’re not ready yet” conversations.
So, when a budding Lebanese singer-songwriter, Tiara, stopped by the Khaleej Times office on February 3, she wasn’t selling a fairy tale. Ten days later, she’d be performing at the Jeddah E-Prix during the Formula E World Championship weekend, on a lineup headlined by Future. But our conversation was more about the process than the flex.
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Tiara, who grew up in Dubai (she calls herself a proper Jumeirah girlie), doesn’t frame her entry into music as a happy accident. “I was always going to be a singer,” she says plainly.
Christina Aguilera was the early benchmark, Burlesque was on repeat, Disney Channel concerts weren’t optional viewing, and childhood workshops in Orlando, New York and LA weren’t hobbies. The vision never really shifted. What did shift was the sound.
French-educated, thinking in English, rooted in Arabic, Tiara’s music now moves between languages as easily as she does between genres: R&B, dark pop textures, reggaeton rhythms, and rap-inspired flows. But the label “pop” doesn’t sit comfortably with her.
“There are too many genres inside that word,” she says. “I listen to rap the most.” That influence shows, not necessarily in obvious bars, but in cadence, in how she approaches flow, and in the confidence she wants listeners to feel. The same confidence is prevalent in her music videos, she says, "It’s how I want people to feel when they listen.”
Her creative process is structured but instinctive. It starts with a beat. In the studio, she records multiple takes, mumbling, testing melodies, switching flows. She’ll build the skeleton first: verse, chorus, bridge. Only after that does the language settle in. “You can feel which language works with which melody,” she explains. “The melody chooses.”
Early in her career, Tiara says she worked with the wrong people. There were contracts that limited her creative output, conversations that told her to wait, to be commercial, and to fit the market before she found herself. At one point, she was told she couldn’t make her own music yet, a frustrating position for someone who identifies as a creator first.
“When you’re not mentally good, you can’t do what you love,” she says. “I learned from my own mistakes.”
She describes that period as brainwashing; being young, trusting the system, believing sacrifice would eventually pay off. Instead, it delayed her growth. Now, her guiding principle is blunt: “Follow your gut. Your body is your compass.”
Building a music career in the region, she says, comes with unspoken rules.
“You’re told you can’t release a six-minute song because people will skip it. You have to think about replay value. Retention.”
But she’s not naïve about the business either. Branding and consistency matter, and she’s aware that execution is the real challenge once you’ve “found yourself.”
And she's found herself, she says, now “it’s just about execution.”
In 2024, Tiara stepped onto the main stage at MDLBEAST and shared it with Steve Aoki. She still calls it one of the best days of her life. But instead of rushing releases off the back of that moment, she slowed down. She spent the next year and a half producing, travelling, often to Cairo, refining her sound and building a catalogue she felt represented her. She began releasing consistently in mid-2025, describing it as the start of a new chapter.
The Jeddah E-Prix performance on February 13, a 17-minute set in front of tens of thousands, is another milestone. Sharing a bill with Future is surreal, especially for someone who listens to rap more than any other genre.
We asked how the show went and Tiara was overjoyed with the experience and the response from the crowd. More importantly, she says, "I understand even better now how I would like my next approach to be, what I want to improve, and what to implement in my routine."
Ask her where she sees herself in five years, and the answer is global audience. Tiara wants to be recognised as a multilingual Arab artist, performer, vocalist, and a dancer. What she doesn't want is to be boxed into one lane. She says, "I have to rise and do everything I can."
