AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The singer Dhruv Sharma is a night owl. It's past midnight for him when I meet him on Zoom because he's back in Singapore, in the childhood bedroom that he used to share with his sister.
DHRUV SHARMA: It's bizarre when you're, like, in between hotels and performing in front of people and to just like be back in the bedroom, where it all started, where, like, things were very ordinary. And it's definitely a weird feeling.
CHANG: Dhruv's transformation into a pop star began in 2019, when he released his debut single called "Double Take." The song blew up on TikTok and became kind of a queer anthem. And now he is out with his debut album called "Private Blizzard."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SPEED OF LIGHT")
SHARMA: (Singing) Now that I'm over the hardest part, I sit by myself, turn the TV on and I think about it all. Years down the drain...
CHANG: Dhruv, who releases music under his first name only, is about to embark on a weekslong tour through Europe. But before he set off on that tour, he wanted to stop back home in Singapore. It's a place he credits when he thinks about all the success that he's had, all the listeners. All of it started here. Even though there wasn't much of a music scene in Singapore growing up, his exposure to music was right in his living room.
SHARMA: My dad - he sings a lot of Hindi music. So my parents are Indian. And he used to sing at, like - which is - it's kind of embarrassing to think of now, but he used to sing at, like, parties, when they'd have friends over and stuff. Like, now...
CHANG: (Laughter).
SHARMA: ...If he did that, I would be absolutely mortified.
CHANG: When he was 18, Dhruv headed to the U.S. to Yale. The idea was to study data science and statistics, but what he ended up doing instead at Yale was launching a music career.
SHARMA: It was just a place where I met people who actually were considering being in the arts as a viable career. In Singapore, that wasn't my experience. Like, nobody I knew really did the arts or wanted to pursue it seriously. It was, like, embarrassing almost to admit that that's what you wanted to do with your life.
CHANG: Well, then in 2019, you released a song called "Double Take," which - basically, it blew up on TikTok. It ended up getting hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. And I saw recently you posted a handwritten note on Instagram, where you wrote, quote, "this song has changed my life in ways I could never have imagined." Tell me what you mean by that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DOUBLE TAKE")
SHARMA: (Singing) I could say I never dare to think...
I think, especially because it was my first song, everything about making that song felt very small. Like, I made it with a friend. I recorded vocals on a $20 mic, and I remember so vividly listening to the first demo of it on the train home and sending it to my sister, and it was an experience that was shared between very few people. So just the tininess of the initial moment compared to how many people have listened to it, to imagine myself going and playing festivals in other parts of the world where everybody's singing it, was unimaginable.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DOUBLE TAKE")
SHARMA: (Singing) Boy, you got me hooked onto something. Who could say that they saw us coming? Tell me, do you feel the love?
CHANG: I mean, even though the circumstances around the song seem so small, the ideas were big, right? Like, this was a song about an important time in your life when you fell in love with a friend.
SHARMA: Yeah, I was about somebody that I had been really good friends with for a really long time and started developing romantic feelings towards, and eventually, we were in a relationship. But it's called "Double Take" because it's about how dizzying that can feel, moving from a place of friendship to moving to something that feels more romantic.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DOUBLE TAKE")
SHARMA: (Singing) Don't know what's come over me. It seems like yesterday when I said, we'll be friends forever. Constellations...
CHANG: Your new album title - it's called "Private Blizzard," which comes from a poem written by Margaret Atwood. Tell me about that poem and why that poem stayed with you.
SHARMA: Well, I studied it in high school, and I grew up in Singapore, queer in Singapore. And even now it's not super-accepted. And at the time, I didn't really know many people who were queer or, honestly, any people for a really long time. And I thought that the phrase, each in his own private blizzard, was the perfect description of the way that I was feeling at the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ILLUSIONS")
SHARMA: (Singing) The truth is that I'm getting too comfortable leaving myself behind, running after new thrills, sprinting up new hills, 'till it all eventually catches up...
What it felt like to be closeted in a city where you didn't really know anybody who was queer and having these very existential thoughts about your life, about what your future was going to look like. And in a very different way, the last couple of years have been a lot of time of me being alone and dealing with heavier things - obviously, different things. I'm very proud and open with my queerness now. But heavy and turbulent in different ways - and I kind of came back to that phrase.
CHANG: I love that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ILLUSIONS")
SHARMA: (Singing) I'm learning the things I've always known. Someone else won't make me whole...
CHANG: Well, what is it like to see your music, as a queer artist, blow up in parts of Asia, especially in places where being queer is not widely accepted?
SHARMA: It's unbelievable. I will get little notes from fans saying exactly that, that it's nice to see somebody who's queer come here and sing and perform because it's not widely accepted. And those messages mean so much to me because I completely understand what that's like. In other parts of the world, it's not just a matter of acceptance. Sometimes, it's a matter of safety as well. And...
CHANG: Yeah.
SHARMA: Yeah, that's something that I think is not lost on me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRAGEDY")
SHARMA: (Singing) Tragedy under the canopy. Your coffee shop in November, set of the tragedy, a painful day to remember.
CHANG: Well, this idea of a blizzard - this internal mess, this internal chaos that maybe other people aren't seeing from the outside - inside the music on this album, can we hear a mess?
SHARMA: Definitely. My intent was to make something that represented that chaos in a musical way. So the album is quite maximal. It features so many different instruments. I mess around with dissonance on a bunch of the different songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRAGEDY")
SHARMA: (Vocalizing).
CHANG: Well, I'm speaking to you just days before your new album is out in the world. What does it feel like to finally share all of this music? - these 12 songs that, as you put it, have held your hand through the past few years?
(SOUNDBITE OF DHRUV SONG, "ODE TO BOREDOM")
SHARMA: Oh, my God. I'm so excited. Making an album is such a mountain. In the middle of the process, you really don't know if you're going to, like, reach the summit. You really don't know if you're going to kind of make it through it. And there are bad days, and there are good days. I'm not somebody who's really dreamed or aspired to be on massive stages, for example. My dreams have always been in the realm of creating and making things. So this feels really huge for me.
CHANG: Well, congratulations. Thank you. Dhruv - his debut album is "Private Blizzard." Thank you so much for sharing this time with me.
SHARMA: Of course. Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ODE TO BOREDOM")
SHARMA: (Singing) If someone asks, it's all going well. Sweet love left four months ago. New love's what I'm looking for, someone who can soundtrack this silence. Keep an eye out for a muse on a train. He'll paint my life a new shade. Give me back my teenage excitement. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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