Unruly hair, a hat on top and dressed often in a pantsuit, as much as Mansa Jimmy’s style is fluid and androgynous, her music too cannot be boxed in a genre - she sings it all from Sufi, Kumaoni, Rajasthani and Gujarati folk to retro Bollywood. In between, her raw yet timbre-touch voice drops notes that glide between nostalgia and melancholia - from her recent song, ‘Mera Yaar Purana’ that speaks of nostalgia of age-old relationships, ‘Kuch Baat Karni Thi’ that delves into unspoken emotions, to ‘Tu Na Aaya’ that capture the longing for love.
For Jimmy, she cannot separate herself from melancholia. “I remember telling my friend a week back during a minor breakdown that I am sick of being melancholic. I have carried this persona since I was little. It’s not something that the worldly experiences have put in me, but I was born with it,” she opens our conversation adding that melancholia is the central theme in her upcoming ‘Untitled’ album.
“Melancholy is not triggered by any particular incident but is a general mood of my life. It’s something that is truthful to me. The upcoming album explores it as an emotion that does not necessarily saddens us, but is a part of us.”
Jimmy’s upcoming album is set for an April release. It features four folk-infused songs - ‘Seelan Ki Khushboo’, ‘Barf’, ‘Kaisi Ye Aandhi Thi’, and ‘Melody Has Died’ played on a guitar, clarinet, and piano for a soft-soothing touch.
“With this album, I am quite happy unlike some of my past music. I am speaking more of my truth with this album. Be it a love song or a sad song, I am singing in the words I think in. Earlier, I was more into understanding the technicalities and collaborating with people and expecting them to fulfil my dreams. Now, I have taken charge of my music - I am writing the story, composing songs, shooting, and is involved with the production,” she says.
A lost romantic
Nainital-born Jimmy calls herself as a lost romantic from home. She romanticises everything about it - the scribbles from old diaries kept on her household’s shelf, the sunlight that brightens her attic bedroom, the loose strands of prayer sung by her father that fill the winter morning, her mother who keeps up with her “feverish dreams” to the street dogs and cats that often laze beside her, lush lakesides, forests and hauntingly beautiful hills.
Every moment spent there turns into a memory, in sharp contrast to the fast-laned metro life of Delhi where she’s been based for the last decade.
“When I come home to the mountains, my senses are elevated. I am this happy, and loving person who soaks everything in nature. I can create music and memories here. Once I go back to a metro city, I feel my mind has stopped thinking. Life becomes just about incidents. I won’t say I become a mechanical person but it numbs my brain. So I often visit home as it’s everything to me,” she says.
She brings the nostalgia of home in the song ‘Seelan Ki Khushboo’ shot in Nainital. “When I come home, there is this stench of dampness all around. I associate this smell with everything happy, sad, heartbreaking, or the feeling of moving on. No matter what the season is, its ghostly presence permeates in the air. When I introduced people to the idea of this song about seelan (dampness), it was received with a lot of laughter from friends and family. But once they heard it, they found it’s a smell that stays with you even though it’s somewhat obnoxious.”
The song ‘Melody Has Died’ is a seemingly melancholic one. It’s about how somebody’s absence still has a remarkable presence in your life. Jimmy related the feeling to her stray dog who is no more. She tells, “Whenever I used to leave her behind and left home, I felt guilty. I felt I lacked giving her a good life in the last days of her life. ‘And who knew that the pain will be missed/After all when you left/ I befriended the bits/ In my time’ these lyrics say how close we get to the losses of life that we stop recognising our personality without them.”
The right crowd matters
Jimmy came to Delhi a decade ago to pursue her music career. She had performed in over a hundred shows in the city before skyrocketing to fame in the pandemic when she started posting covers of popular songs like ‘Chaudhary’, ‘Genda Phool’, ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ and ‘Tu Jhoom Jhoom’ amongst others. Many of her videos earned lakhs of views on Instagram making her an overnight internet sensation and a break-out star of Coke Studio Bharat Season 1.
“I was going insane in the pandemic and got Covid three times. I was wondering how to take my music ahead when gigs are shutting! I started posting reels with covers so I do not go out of practice and the reception was beyond amazing!” she says adding that she tries to strike a balance between virality and being authentic.
“The numbers definitely take a toll on you. But for me, reaching the right crowd is more important. I seek quality listenership over random followers,” says the musician who is blessed and cherished by poet Gulzar, actor Dia Mirza, singer Sona Mahapatra and composers Salim-Sulaiman, amongst others.
As an emerging artiste on the move, Jimmy’s days are packed more than ever. Last month itself, she took 15 flights, covering 7 states of India for shows such as KNMA in The Park, and Spoken Fest 2025, as well as intimate gigs in the middle of sand dunes in Rajasthan while also having an unforgettable meeting with Gulzar, besides working for her upcoming album. With so many lived experiences and memories, is music enough to express? If ever there’s a book written about her she would love to borrow the title from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s I Have More Souls Than One (Penguin, 2018). “I feel many souls are living within me. I try to be the very next person that I meet — be with them, make them feel comfortable, and be a part of their stories,” she says.