Simba the New Pop Musician of the Famous Jassi’s Family

By Sohani Mittal/ Vandana Bansal Simba Sing inherited the passion for music from his family of musicians. Born to a prolific Punjabi singer, he is a songwriter, singer and record producer. Based in Los Angeles, Simba recently released his American pop music compositions that received immense love from the audience, both in India and abroad. He shared his journey in an exclusive interview with Loudest.in.  Q1. You come from a Punjabi family of Musicians; the kind of music you grew up with is very different from what you do. What got you to American Pop Music? My dad is a Punjabi singer and I grew up seeing him perform for huge crowds. Music came into me from him. I thought music is the only thing one can do in life and there is nothing else; that’s how I saw music. I was 10 years old, the first time I started singing. I was singing in a group in school where everyone was singing in English. My friends introduced me to American Pop Music, hip hop and it was very different from the sound I grew up around. I realised that people are listening to English music, no matter they understand it or not because they like it. So I thought “What is this feeling people admire?”, I want to sing it! I saw Hip Hop Videos. I was 11 or 12 years old, so, things like gold chains, big cars used to fascinate me, I used to say “I want it. I want to be in that video”. Once I grew up I realised that these materialistic things are not what music is about, you need to be good with your music and make people feel it.    Q2. Did your musical journey have a deliberate direction or did it simply evolve in whatever direction it found? When I was introduced to American Music I was like “This is what I am going to do”. Then all small steps came naturally in the same direction like learning techniques from Youtube and my will of doing that music grew stronger.    Q3. You were mentored by Mr. Jeff Bhasker who is a five time Grammy Award winner. How was your experience learning from him a game changer? It was a huge game changer for me. It changed my whole life and music. I auditioned for Berklee College of Music in 2014 and during my college years, I interned with him for two summers, i.e., 2016 and 2017. In 2016, I interned under his producer so it wasn’t directly under him. Second summer was directly under him. But I didn’t do any music under him main things I did were clean the studio, make coffee and listening to people from the kitchen while you are washing dishes while they sang inside. Maybe those were his ways of making me realise that these fundamental things are important too. Once you handle small things, eventually big things will follow.     Q4. According to you how has internet affected the music business? It’s one of the game changers. Internet has connected us to global music. There is this song ‘Run this town’ by Rihanna and ‘Uptown funk’ by Bruno Mars. Whatever songs he wrote or produced I think, completely changed the music scene. They used to be totally different from what was out there already. He came up with a fresh approach.    Q5.“Got You” was inspired by a personal story and the risqué lyrics have resulted in a groovy production. Can you touch upon the story for our viewers? It was about 2019 last summer when I was in LA. I was taking care of Jeff’s house as he was out of town. He owns such a big house in Hollywood and I was incharge at that time. My brother from India and my friend from New Jersey came to visit me. Apparently, my brother was staying with me. We both were chilling and relaxing. My brother shared about his life that he was talking to a girl, but they weren’t dating at that point but were about to. But their chemistry didn't work and it started working with me, unknowingly. With no intention, like I want to take my brother’s girl, nothing like that. It just started happening and I asked my brother if that's fine with him. So, me and this girl had an official- non official relationship. She was Latin so that inspired me. I wrote the song in 10 minutes. So, I was really like inspired by what I went through, putting my experience to it and my brother did the beat and the production. It is funny how things came up.   Q6. What has been the impact of music and music industry because of the lockdown? It gave me and my brother to sit and really think about what kind of music we want to give to people and in what direction we want to head. Lockdown forced everyone to stay at home and think about their life in a critical and serious way. When you are home with yourself, you think and sometimes overthink. Me and my brother took this time to really sit down and just make quality music, you know, how can we be better. As this the time when we can make music, release music and when everything goes back to normal, we have songs that we could perform anywhere.   Q7. You recently released ‘80s Love’ and post that ‘Got you’. It is all happening in a pandemic situation when we are all locked in our houses. What went behind the making of these songs in such a situation? Got You was made way before the lockdown and we were like let's just finish it. 80’s Love was made in the lockdown. We had a lot of ideas going on and 80’s Love was something that clicked and we thought this is something that people would like. My process is that I do melody first over a beat, and later I work on the lyrics. It was pretty quick with that song but the finishing, the little details and the polishing that took a lot of a lot of time as it was 25th version of the song.   Q8. What would you be doing right now, if it wasn't for your music career? I would be playing soccer. I was a really good athlete in my school days. I was the 3rd fastest in Delhi under 19 in 100m. I was also playing inter school soccer  and going to other states. So, I would be playing soccer.   Q9. “Got You” has garnered 40k+ streams of Spotify and 100k+ views on YouTube. 80s love received all the love from audience. Now, What are your plans ahead? I am actually coming up with a new song next month and another song in a couple of months. I have made all the songs in the lockdown and now I have the chance to liberate them monthly. I am also planning a video for my 4th single. We are planning and finding out that how we properly plan out the video in such scenario. Also, I have an EP ready which consists 5 songs. I made them with Jeff in LA, so I am planning to release it soon, probably after few singles.   Listen to his songs: [embed]https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Dn0LHcvgOdA2lcsHwmWcj?si=ALPhOCyMRrW6UEZGBe7LVw[/embed]