At a party organised at Shakira’s producer Tim Mitchell’s penthouse in Miami last year, Natania Lalwani and her songwriting partner Asha Madhukar, wrote a song, titled Sober. The impromptu creation was inspired by a text message from a friend who had just been broken up with.
“The text had said something along the lines of ‘don’t say it’s over, until we’re sober’, and I fell in love with that concept,” said Lalwani.
Lalwani and Madhukar performed the song live for Mitchell’s guests. “We played the song about 60 times on loop while drinking wine on a Miami rooftop, so high from the song we had just written – it was an incredible night of music,” said Lalwani.
Relatively unknown in India’s pop and Bollywood music scene, Lalwani has been carving an identity in the American music industry for the last five years. She began recording her first album, Hope And Heartbreak, in 2012 while still at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, but it was when her debut hit, Cherry Love (2012), aired on music channel VH1 that Lalwani realised she could make it big.
Since then, Lalwani’s songs have begun to crop up in unexpected places: in recent years, her tracks have been featured on US X Factor, Late Night With Seth Myers, Born This Way, Teen Mom and Big Brother. The song, When I Was Young sung by Neo Noir and written by Lalwani, peaked at number three on the Spotify US and Global Viral charts.
Lalwani has also written music specifically for documentary features, including the series, I Am Cait, which chronicles the life of Caitlyn Jenner after her gender transition. Recently, the 24-year-old wrote the music for the official trailer of the soon-to-release Heart of Man, a faith-based docu-drama.
Lalwani’s style adheres to the western-pop music earworm formula of hit artists like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus: her themes mostly deal with the matters of the heart, have rhythm, catchy melodies and saccharine lyrics. Lalwani does not shy away from experimenting with incorporating indie pop and electronic dance music influences into her music, and has even dabbled in a darker sound for her last single, Prisoner.
Enough is a return to a lighter sound, with influences from EDM. “Cherry Love was very indie singer-songwriter and innocent, the last song, Prisoner, was dark and trap heavy, but Enough is warm and bright. I’m always changing and growing as a human and I always want that to reflect in my artistry as my biggest hope is to be as real and authentic as I possibly can be.”
Music has played a major role in Lalwani’s life since an early age. “My mom listened to a lot of English artists like Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, so I grew up listening to a lot of those artists,” said Lalwani. “Music was always around the house and I would always have my headphones on, which was quite an annoyance to the rest of my family.” She received her first formal training in music as part of Mumbai’s Stop Gaps Choral Ensemble, one of India’s most prestigious choirs and then went on to study music at Berklee before moving on to the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles.
According to Lalwani, her music is inspired by “details of any emotion”. “The intricacies of heartbreak or happiness, that’s beautiful to me. I still think it’s so cool that you can write an entire three minute song based on a fleeting feeling or a single moment and make it last forever,” she said.
A big believer in the power of “hustling”, whether it’s to promote her work online or make her way into Bollywood, as Lalwani now hopes to do, a lot of her day is spent speaking to publishers and producers trying to push her work out there.
“I think digital releases are the best platform right now as you have a reach to so many people around the world, but it involves a lot of work to promote the visual content, get platforms to feature you with their big followings on social media,” she said. “The key is to get it to reach as many people as possible which can be tough but not impossible if you hustle.”
She spends her days, typically powered by several cups of coffee, emailing producers, coordinating recordings, writing music for TV and other artists. Her nights, however, are spent with a pen and paper, working on her songs. “The music and lyrics go together for me but most of the time I have the story or concept in my head before. I have a tonne of ideas on my phone and it can usually take anything between 15 minutes to 2 hours to even months to finish a song. Enough, for example, took about two months because I wrote it in pieces.”
One of Lalwani’s forthcoming project has brought her back to Mumbai. The artist is currently working with Indian singer Ash King, responsible for Bollywood hits like Te Amo and Baarish. “I feel people need to collaborate more in in India,” she said. “I don’t see a lot of people sitting down to write a song together here, it’s more like one person wrote the song, another person is singing it. When you are all involved in the whole process you become so much closer to the music.”
Lalwani is slowly trying to break into the inner circles of the Indian music industry, undeterred by its cliquish nature. “I think when you are constantly putting out good content, putting yourself in the right places and putting yourself out there where you are meeting new people, it becomes a little less difficult for people to invite you in.”
