Bengaluru-based musician Huyana’s new single is about complicated relationships

Varshita Ramesh aka Huyana
| Photo Credit: Lekha Ratnam

If you’ve ever been in love with someone who blows hot and cold, it is likely that listening to singer Varshita Ramesh’s single Can’t Fall/Won’t Fall, will evoke many memories, not always pleasant ones. “It is a strange kind of love. But it works when it does,” goes the song, which focuses on a woman’s relationship with a man who takes more than he gives, leaving her hungering for more, subsisting on the occasional scrap of love he throws her way.

“It is about a relationship in which you are not drawing boundaries, where you are nervous and afraid that you are going to be left,” says Ramesh of the song, which dropped on all major platforms on June 9. “You are aware that it is bad for you, but you are willingly putting yourself in the situation.”

Can’t Fall/Won’t Fall is a part of Ramesh’s debut EP Anxious Attachment, which is set to release in July this year. Like the rest of the EP, the song has strong R&B/Soul influences, reflecting the pain and longing that comes with trying to hold onto someone who has drifted away, a recurring theme in her music. With the exception of the 2021 song Nothing Wrong In Not Being Okay, her songs have always focused on relationships.

“Each of my releases highlights what I have been through, and what I need to get over,” says the 24-year-old singer, who goes by the stage name, Huyana (Cherokee for raindrops), which is also what Varshita means in Sanskrit. “I found comfort in the fact that I could express myself and create art under a pseudonym that was still attached to my real identity.”

Anxious Attachment will release in July
| Photo Credit:
Lekha Ratnam

Most of the songs in Anxious Attachment were written in the past three years, “at a point in my life where my relationships were failing, and I was doing everything in my life to keep them afloat.” And although she is now at a very different point in her life, these songs are very important to her. “They are very relatable, and I want a lot of people to listen to them.”

Always a singer

Ramesh has been singing for almost 20 years now, right from the time she was four years old “when my parents discovered that I could hold a note and not go off-key,” she says. It helped that she came from an artistic family, full of classical singers and dancers, who encouraged her right from the start.

Growing up in Bangkok — she lived there between the ages of two and 12 — meant that she was exposed to international music really early in life. “I started singing for fun there,” she says. But when she moved back to Chennai at the age of 13, what was just a fun hobby became a more serious calling. “My mother suggested that I skip a year and join the KM Music Conservatory there,” she says, referring to the music institute founded by the A. R. Rahman Foundation back in 2008. “That was how seriously they took my music,” she says.

The decision, she believes, completely shaped the way she looked at music. “I realised that I could make a career of it and be respected as a musician,” says Ramesh, who has been earning a living by performing at hotels since she 14. Even when she went back to high school and later, college at Mount Carmel College, she continued gigging and recording, working both independently and in collaboration with other musicians, including three-time Grammy Award-winner, Ricky Kej.

She even went on to win a scholarship at the Goa Jazz Academy in 2021, studying and performing in the sea-shackled state for 6 months, an experience she describes as validating. “I got to experience a genre that I didn’t know about and learnt so much,” she says. “Also, I worked with so many musicians in Goa. It made me so much more confident.”

On future plans, she says she has many, some of which are in too incipient a stage to talk about at this stage. But this she does know. “It doesn’t matter what genre I am working in, what I am doing and who I am doing it for. If I am doing music, I am happy,” she says, with a laugh. “I make a living out of this and want to do this for the rest of my life.”