Seema Farswani‘s “Born To Fly,” out September 16th, started as something written for her own daughters before growing into something much wider after she performed at The Voices Unseen, a Singapore charity concert supporting visually impaired communities and women’s empowerment. What began as a personal message became a cinematic soft-rock anthem about hope, courage, and possibility for girls and women more broadly, built around what Farswani describes as wanting to give “every girl the courage and freedom to dream beyond the horizon.” The track pairs soaring Western guitars with sitar and Hindi vocals, an intentional East-meets-West blend brought to life with Mumbai-based collaborators Rishabh Sharma on guitars and co-production and Ananya Wadkar on sitar and vocals, alongside Singapore’s Shania Tan on backing vocals.
The sitar here is brilliantly expressive, and the song carries a sincere human warmth that’s genuinely rare in pop music these days, to be frank. That warmth comes through as much in the arrangement’s patience as in the vocal performance itself; the track moves from something intimate into something wider and more collective without losing the personal feeling that started it. It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially on a song built around a message this direct, and Farswani and her collaborators pull it off without the track ever tipping into something saccharine.
Seema has shifted between genres multiple times across her catalogue, from the multilingual debut EP “Got My Mojo” through Arabian-rhythm-inflected pop-rock and design-inspired singles like “Sketches on the Walls,” and this direction, leaning into her South Asian roots alongside rock instrumentation, is a genuinely compelling one. I’ll be checking out more of her catalogue off the back of this, and I hope we get more from Seema in this particular vein going forward.
