Arya and I first met one gloriously sunny C-Sunday. Connected by a mutual friend, we bonded over our shared love of songwriting and delved immediately into the nitty-gritty. We discussed the poets that have influenced their style, the vulnerability of sharing art, the catharsis that comes with translating feeling into music. Our conversation was so gripping that I remember it well, even through the haze.

“I fell in love with the idea that you could make a poem more beautiful by singing it”

A year on, we meet again to discuss Arya’s music more formally. Since last year, they have placed first in the Cambridge-based songwriting competition Hook, Line and Lyric, performed at multiple Caius open-mic nights, and continued their work on their first record. “I’ve been writing ever since I was little,” Arya tells me, “and I gained that love of storytelling from my mum. She was really good at making stories up on the spot”. When they turned ten, they wrote their first song about the loss of their grandfather. “It was on the ukulele, because I was, like, eleven,” they laugh, “but I fell in love with the idea that you could make a poem more beautiful by singing it”.

Since coming to university, the absence of an easily accessible piano has led Arya to write more songs on the guitar. “I was never inherently good at it, so I had to experiment and then just hit record. That was new. Beforehand, I’d always thought so much about the words I’m writing and whether they convey what I want them to convey”.

Arya’s lyricism is strikingly raw. I’d been lucky enough to hear them play at the start of our interview. Their imagery is piercing even in its abstraction, so I’m keen to ask them about the experience of sharing such emotional material. “It’s really scary. Some songs I write show my heart being splayed open”. At open mics, they had previously defaulted to songs they’d written a long time ago, “or songs written more in metaphor, almost so that people couldn’t see it was me”. But moving to Cambridge has allowed them to write songs in plainer language: “I feel freer to be more literal.”

Alongside songwriting, Arya is a medic, actor, and Sidney Sussex chorister. I express my admiration – how do they manage to spin all those plates at once? The second year of a medical degree leaves very little time to write an album, but Arya’s passion finds a way to shine through the academic stress. They decided to enter Hook, Line and Lyric (which they would go on to win) the day before the submission deadline. “It was smack dab in the middle of exam season, the night before my last exam. I spent the entirety of the night producing the song”. When asked what advice they’d give to fellow songwriters, they remind others of their work’s inherent uniqueness. “Nobody has the same point of view that you do. You might have similar experiences to someone else, but the way that you think about them is yours.”

“I want it to be that, if I had found this album and nobody had heard of it, I would plug it to everyone I met”

Ambling back along Jesus Lane, we practically continue the interview. While pulling off double-denim in the manner that only indie-folk singer-songwriters can, Arya eulogises ‘Almost Heaven’ by Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon – a singer with 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Arya would celebrate that “niche indie artist” title: “I want it to be that, if I had found this album and nobody had heard of it, I would plug it to everyone I met. You might not like it, but I love it”. Arya’s philosophy has stayed with me since. They candidly displayed their acceptance that not everyone would take to their music, but for Arya, embracing that nicheness is not limiting, but liberating.