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Musician Sezairi lost the ability to sing when the pandemic hit

Things are looking up for singer-songwriter Sezairi.

His third album Violets Aren't Blue is out, a few months after he became the first local musician to have a song clock more than 100 million streams on Spotify.

It is a far cry from a few years ago when the pandemic hit - he was in such low spirits that he lost the ability to sing.

"The pandemic really slapped me in the face," the 35-year-old says in a Zoom interview, adding that it scuppered his plans to go overseas to work on new music.

Gigs also dried up as various restrictions kicked in.

"I don't know what it was, but I slept a lot, I didn't eat properly."

Eventually, he got round to writing Raindrops, one of the tunes on his new album. "But when I was recording that song in the studio, I couldn't sing. And that was the first time in my decade-long career as a recording artiste that I couldn't sing.

"That was a really difficult time for me because I didn't know what to do. I went to the doctor, I went to the ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist, to see what's wrong with my throat, but nothing was wrong at all."

After much soul-searching, he concluded that music was his cure.

"I had to force myself to sing, so that my body would naturally feel like it's eased off all of this anxiety."

He gets emotional when he listens to Raindrops today because the positive feedback he received for the track inspired him to work on more songs.

"I took it upon myself to kind of just do whatever I could to get out of this headspace, so that I could focus on writing songs that weren't so depressing," says the singer who came to fame after winning the third season of reality television show Singapore Idol in 2009.

"I wanted to give a little bit of hope, not so much for the audience as for myself."

The title of the new album is taken from one of the tracks, Violets.

"I always saw myself as a love song writer, but after 13 years of writing love songs, you're always searching for a new perspective. And me being someone who's quite introspective, I keep reaching back into my old relationships and experiences of how I perceive love, how I receive love," says the singer.

He got married in 2016 and his wife, Ms Syaza Qistina Tan, works in the e-sports industry.

Even as the pandemic continued, things started to slowly pick up.

At the end of 2020, he took part in a show titled Back To Live at Sands Theatre at Marina Bay Sands, the biggest music event with a live audience since measures to curb the pandemic kicked in earlier that year.

Last year (in 2021), his singing career got another boost when he was one of four artistes who sang the National Day Parade theme song, The Road Ahead.

In March this year (2022), he hit a new high when his 2018 ballad It's You went viral in countries such as Indonesia, thanks to TikTok, and he became the first Singaporean to have a song receive more than 100 million streams on Spotify.

The song has since hit 126 million streams while its YouTube video has clocked 69 million views.

"I think as a Singaporean, it really opened my perspective to what's possible around the region," he says.

"It's a sense of validation that I never quite experienced in my life before."

Violets Aren't Blue is out on music streaming services.

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