Armaan Malik was only nine when he started visiting recording studios to sing jingles in multiple languages. A decade-and-a-half later, the visits to recording studios haven’t stopped. Rather his repertoire of songs has only grown in languages such as Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Malayalam, and of course Hindi and English.
At 26, he has become the first Indian singer to perform at the Grammys Global Spin, a concert series produced by the Recording Academy to promote global music.
With his latest single ‘You’, this multilingual singer has become the country’s first and Asia’s second artiste, after B.I. aka Kim Han-bin from South Korea, to feature in the global series which was started in 2020.
“I’m grateful that ‘You’ is doing the rounds on social media. This is my fourth English single and unlike the other ones I’ve released, which have more pop elements to them, I wanted ‘You’ to be a romantic ballad,” says Malik, explaining why the music video was shot in Paris.
“People usually know me for my romantic numbers and I’m glad that I was able to bring that back again with this song. The arrangements were straightforward and done on a guitar. It’s my lyrics that do most of the talking,” adds the songwriter who trained in Hindustani classical music for 10 years, before learning western music from Berklee College of Music, Boston, US.
The successful singer with Hindi films such as MS Dhoni, Kabir Singh, Article 15 etc forayed into English music with his first single ‘Control’ in 2020. The song made it to the Times Square Billboard in New York. Since then, he has released four more chartbusters besides ‘You’, which has over 19 million views and counting on YouTube.
For another of his English single, ‘Echo’, he collaborated with Korean-American artist Eric Nam and platinum music producer KSHMR. “I’ve been happy working with Bollywood but the 15-year-old kid in me always wanted to do pop music. That itch wasn’t going away. So, in 2020, when I felt like I finally had the opportunity, I took the chance. I’m glad I did it as it won me the Best Indian Act at Europe Music Awards that year,” he says.
This nephew of composer Anu Malik thinks that the pandemic-induced lockdowns made young musicians like him experiment with different formats of music. He, for one, started paying attention to independent music.
“Everyone has had to come out of their shell at some point and hone their skills. The audience is finally getting to see the faces of the artistes they’ve been listening to and musicians have been able to bring out more singles,” he says. Malik has also launched his label Always Music Global in association with Warner Music India.
He says, “We want to produce songs with a more global kind of sound. We know how well K-pop is doing internationally. I want to work towards taking Hindi music to the same global level.” His army of fans (over 50 million followers on social media) known as ‘Armaanians’ can’t wait for him to fulfill this desire.
Looking back at his experience of working with international and Indian producers, he says, “In the West, working on a song is a collaborative effort. Everyone—from the producer, composer, lyricist to the artists—is in one room during the process. In India, it’s usually individual work and the final collaboration happens at the end. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
But the style of approach can be learnt from each other,” says Malik, who now combines both these methods when he works on a song. Like a true global melody maker.