You hear the name Tesher and your mind instantly starts humming Jalebi Baby and just after the verse, you find yourselves shaking a leg. This is the effect the Canadian singer-rapper has on his largely Instagram-oriented audience. Even at the Indulge office, right after an exclusive chat with the hit-maker, there was a full-blown jamming session on some of his popular tracks like Young Shahrukh, Old Town X Ramta Jogi but it was his debut with Jason Derulo that really got our groove on.
For anyone living under a rock, maybe it is time you step out and introduce yourself to Hitesh Sharma, professionally known as Tesher, a popular name within the fusion music circuit. Born in Regina, Tesher rose to fame after he started releasing mashups of Bollywood songs with Western hip-hop on YouTube and Soundcloud which later made their way to Instagram and he became an overnight sensation.
With his initial music influences rooted somewhere in his Indian heritage fused with pop, house and sometimes salsa, Tesher’s tracks even got the likes of Simu Liu and Ranveer Singh hooked. All you got to do is give him a catchy beat and phrases in Hindi to work with and he can give you chart-bursting music; just like he did with 1986 hit A Kind of Magic for Coke Studio’s global launch.
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Currently, Tesher is mentoring two talented, up-and-coming artistes for Ballantine’s Glassware True Music campaign. He is one of the three mentors who, with a series of workshops, will further talents from across progressive music genres of India.
How do you decide which songs work best together?
There are a lot of ways you can decide which songs work together, the most basic of which is just seeing which songs have the same kind of speed. But that’s where you’re going to end up with mashups that don’t really make a lot of sense. When I was making remixes, I would always try to find ways to have songs that had a similar theme as well as the same kind of speed. Both Old Town Road and Ramta Jogi, for example, had a wandering soul, rebel-without-a-cause kind of feel to them.
What does your creative process look like?
My creative process usually starts with instrumentation. I’m a producer first, so, I just make beats and then I move on to the melodies — I just sing random little melodies and tunes that come to my head and then write to those melodies. It’s the same approach that Michael Jackson was known for.
What pushed you towards producing and mixing music?
When I was growing up in Canada, my parents would always be playing Punjabi music, Bollywood music, Qawwalis and Bhajans around the house. And when I would go to school, everyone would be listening to pop music and rap music and I thought, it would be neat if I put these two together. In a way, it was pretty reflective of my identity.
Tell us how the pandemic impacted your music journey.
It was crazy. The weirdest part about it was seeing my songs blow up and rack up all these views and me not really being able to see it and experience it in person. There were some places in the world that were not under lockdown and I would see clubs going off with Young Shahrukh and Jalebi Baby, and I didn’t get to experience that at the time. I was just in lockdown, in my bedroom, just living the exact same life. And then seeing everything in person, it just hit me like a brick which was a weird thing to adjust to, but I’m grateful for it all.
Mashup music is a saturated space now. How do you deal with the competition?
Easy, I stopped making mashups.
You name most of your songs after popular Indian references. Tell us a bit about it.
For Young Shahrukh, I was just writing a song about my experiences in Toronto — being a guy in his mid-20s, just enjoying life, being out and about in the big city while you’re young. To the people listening to that song, the people of our generation, Shahrukh Khan is the coolest guy. So, to express that I felt like I’m the coolest guy around when I’m living this life, saying that I feel like Shahrukh Khan was just the quickest way for me to explain that. For Jalebi Baby — I was just talking about a sweet girl and what’s sweeter than a jalebi? Simple as that.
What sparked your interest in associating with Ballantine’s Glassware True Music?
If you think about what this music industry looked like 10 years ago, there were no reels, there were no YouTube Shorts, and Spotify was just emerging. There were music DSPs that used to exist then that don’t exist now, TV channels that showed music videos have shut down — so many things have changed so rapidly. I think I can still give some important tips to people that are starting their careers because the knowledge that I’ve learned over the past couple of years, that’s very relevant for an artiste trying to break out today.
Tesher’s latest track Jacquemus is now streaming on all major audio streaming platforms and YouTube.