Shreya Sharma couldn’t have asked for a better music debut. The young singer has collaborated with The Doorbeen (Onkar Singh and Gautam Sharma aka Baba) for their latest party number Prada. It was a highly anticipated track after the duo’s hit Lamberghini. The song marks Alia Bhatt’s debut in non-film music video space.
Prada, which has been sung by Onkar, Baba and Shreya, has lived up to the expectations and has got more than 18 million views. Shreya, who has lent her voice for Alia, says, “It feels great to receive such amazing response and seeing everyone enjoy it. We have made the song with so much love and enthusiasm.” The track has been written and composed by The Doorbeen.
Shreya says that the song was composed a week after Lamberghini released. “Onkar and Baba thought about doing a track. They said, ‘Let’s work on it from scratch’. It was so much fun working together. We weren’t thinking about where and how the song will release. Later, a few changes were made to the track including the lyrics and the music. None of us had imagined that Alia would feature in the song,” she says, adding that 10 days before the shoot, they got to know that the Highway actress was going to be a part of the video too.
Shreya says that she was super excited to sing for Alia. Recalling the moment when Onkar informed her the same, she says, “I was speaking to Onkar on the phone when he told me and I was like, ‘Can I call you back?’. I kept the phone and pinched myself and screamed for a minute, which I couldn’t have done while speaking to him (laughs). It’s a dream singing for her.”
The singer has created a name for herself with the covers she has sung for her YouTube channel. She says Alia’s and her voice and style are very different. “But we bonded well when we met. She was very nice and told me that she liked my voice. She called it versatile.”
There must have been pressure on the team before the release of Prada because Lamberghini was a massive hit even a year after its release. “Yes, there was a certain pressure because of the expectations. We kept thinking, ‘Are people going to like it as much as Lamberghini?’. No matter how much people around me told me to relax because Prada is a good song, I was anxious. It’s very hard to live up to the expectations,” she says.
As for her collaboration with The Doorbeen, she replies, “Onkar and Baba are friends-turned-family. They are my brothers. We would sit around, joke, laugh and after a point, we’d be like, ‘Thoda kaam kar lete hai’. It did not feel like work. It was three musicians jamming together and having the best time of their life.”
The singer started learning classical music at the age of four and went on to study music at Welham Girls’ School Dehradun. Later, she went to Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she studied Opera and Musical Theatre. Shreya, who has learnt both Hindustani and Western classical, says that Indian classical helps with ear training. “It helps when you are hearing a new track because the ear is trained and you can learn it quickly. Western classical, on the other hand, teaches you breath work and body relation,” she says, adding, “While the two forms are very different, they both make your basics very strong.”
In case of commercial tracks, there are certain techniques that one learns over the years. “If there is a difficult patch, you know how to hold your breath and so on,” she says.
