How a Song Arrives: Inside Aneesa Sheikh's Writing Process

The record that gets played more than anything else in her catalogue has no studio anywhere in its origin story. It has a car, a motorway, and a conversation she was not steering.

Aneesa Sheikh was in a car with Punjabi friends when the subject came up, and what they handed her was closer to a market reading than a suggestion: a bilingual record with a rap section in it would land hard with every girl raised in the West. She was in a studio before the day was out, and the words came without a fight. The song carries the name "Down" and remains the record she points people to first — the acoustic version, specifically.

That is one way a song arrives for her. Here is another. "Iconic", the most recent of eighteen released tracks, was begun in London, moved with her to Brooklyn, worked on in Michigan and closed out in Mumbai. One record took an afternoon. The other took four cities.

Put side by side, the two dismantle the usual assumption about a songwriter — that there is a method, and that the method is the artist. What stays constant across Aneesa's catalogue is not the pace of the writing. It is who is in the room, what happens to be audible outside it, and how late the title is allowed to arrive.

She does not write alone, and the people she writes with are not session hires. Lewis Hensley and Yorgos Kerasiotis write and produce alongside her in the studio, and she describes them as her producers and her mentors. The clearest measure of what that arrangement is worth is not a credit list. It is that on the night she opened for The Wanted at Sound Board in Detroit — the show she names as her most memorable — both of them walked out and performed beside her. The writing room and the stage had the same occupants.

The second constant is that whatever she is standing next to ends up in the file. Aneesa was living in Dubai while "Iconic" came together, hearing Arabic instrumentation around her, and it went into the arrangement: producer Hriday Gatani built Arabic-style elements into the track. The result is a dance-driven pop record with South Asian influences, carrying Hindi and Urdu inside it along with a rap passage. The itinerary of the writing is audible in the finished record, which is exactly why the working title was what it was.

That working title was "Brooklyn to Bombay" — an accurate description of how the song was being made and a useless description of what it was about. It was replaced for a plain reason: she kept saying the word "iconic" out loud in the room, and the song eventually took it off her. Something similar had already happened once: "Down" first went out under a title that named a route, and now carries the name of the state it describes. In both cases the geography went into the working title and came back out of the final one.

Then the writing stops and the recording starts, and this is the single documented place where her first career works against her. Years of competitive skating train a body to answer music with movement. In a vocal booth that is a liability. She had a habit of shaking a leg, or of wanting the room rather than the spot, while a take was running, and learning that stillness is sometimes precisely what a vocal moment needs took real work. Almost everything else about being an athlete transferred to the stage more or less intact. This one thing had to be taken apart.

The take itself sits on top of a daily practice that belongs to no particular song. Aneesa grew up speaking only English. Her Hindi and her diction are the product of a standing arrangement with the dialect and acting coach Kulvinder Bakshish. His instruction at the outset was to ignore the absence of visible progress and keep the practice daily; the click, he told her, would arrive on its own. "Since working with him, the people around me have seen my biggest improvement yet," she says. "I now apply that mindset to everything." Movement is a second standing arrangement, with the choreographer Paresh Shirodkar. Acting coaching in American English runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and vocal training and vocal cardio sit inside the daily workout. A vocal take, on that schedule, is not a performance. It is a reading of where a year of practice has got to.

All eighteen tracks have gone out independently, without a label. It is easy to file that as a status detail; in practice it is a process detail. Nobody outside the room decides which song is finished, which one goes out as a single, or what it ends up being called. Retitling a record that was already released, as happened with "Down", is the kind of decision available to a writer who is also the person signing off the artwork.

There is a full album behind the single, still unheard. She has several of its songs on repeat herself — the ones, she says, that sound most like her own — and says her accent has audibly improved across the releases, which makes the catalogue, played in order, a record of somebody learning a language in public.

Two songs, then, on opposite timescales: one written between a car and a studio inside a single day, one assembled across four cities and a fifth country's instrumentation. What they have in common is the ending. In both cases she found out what the song was called only after she had worked out what it was.