In love with love

Indie singer Anuv Jain is on top of the playlists. His DMs are exploding.Hearts beat in his songs, but they also take a beating. How does he make breakups sound so poetic? And where are all these feels coming from?

- Karishma Kuenzang

For the rest of his life, Anuv Jain will remember 2024. It's the year the 29-year-old singer-songwriter from Ludhiana, Punjab, had the top song on Spotify. Husn, about the pain of one-sided love, came out in 2023. That it's still resonating with listeners a year on is both a surprise and a form of validation. "It's the craziest thing to happen to an artist today," he says. A good song might win an award, go viral for a bit. "But topping a streaming service means the song has reached more people. That's the best indicator of how your music is faring."

Husn is also among the most streamed Indian songs of the year on other platforms, as was his other hit Jo Tum Mere Ho. Both works, like so much of his music, are acoustic and talk of love - lost love, unrequited love, brooding love, entangled love. In many ways, it seems, life couldn't have turned out any other way.

Opening notes

Most songwriters put out their first love songs after their own experiences with it - a crush, perhaps, or a romance gone sour. They're usually the heroes of the story. Jain's muses visited earlier. He was 17 when he watched his mother mourn his father, who passed away after being in a coma for seven years. "Mom went through a massive heartbreak," he says. "She still gets sad as the memories keep coming back, more than a decade on." He wrote the 2019 song, Riha, for her, keeping the melody simple and celebrating the idea of being in love with someone you've lost. The song currently has 16M views on YouTube.