Musicians at Yale-NUS: An interview with Spotify-verified artists

In this interview, Yale-NUS alumni and Spotify-verified artists, Darryl Sim (Class of 2024) and Mpiwa Gwindi (Class of 2024) shared their reflections on their journeys as musicians, a song they produced and released together, and their future dreams and endeavours.

Q: What has your journey as a musician been like? How has Yale-NUS helped or shaped you as an artist?

Darryl: My journey has been like a road trip with many pit stops and a changing destination. Writing and producing my songs have always been something I enjoyed doing. However, what I wanted to do with it was never clear to me. To this end, my four years at Yale-NUS has helped me find a clearer destination, providing multiple pit stops for me to evaluate and re-evaluate my relationship with music. Some of these pit stops were the 24-hour Creative Sprint (an event organised by the Yale-NUS Visual Arts Society, where students with interests in various creative media are grouped randomly and have 24 hours to complete a creative piece), the Mystery Internship opportunity at Phnom Penh, my semester abroad at Swarthmore College, and the Aspire: Five-Week Music Performance Intensive at Berklee College of Music under the Summer Arts Scholarship. These moments gave me space and time to further develop as an artist while pursuing my degree.

Mpiwa: My journey as a musician has been a set of joyful and nurturing experiments. I started at ten years old, playing two instruments and concurrently training in performing arts. This training afforded me the opportunities to expand into and be inspired by different art forms from all over the world over the past 13 years, which helped me explore dancing, singing, producing music and songwriting.

Yale-NUS is the birthplace of my interest in music production interest projects. I never imagined that starting to produce music during my semester break in Singapore in 2021 would lead to sharing my music with supportive art lovers worldwide and the opportunity to perform internationally.

Q: You have produced a song together. What was that like? What was the inspiration behind that song?

Darryl: The backbone of our song, “One (Wedding Song)”, emerged from the 24-hour Creative Sprint event over recess week in our first semester at Yale-NUS. We were randomly grouped together along with our dear friend, Tamane Harata (Class of 2024), and had 24 hours to create something. As part of the event’s motivation to bring together artists from all fields, we decided to compose a song in Shona (a language of Zimbabwe), combining the violin, mbira, and acoustic guitar, with electronic production, and titled the song “One”.

Fast forward to the semester break of our third year, when Mpiwa received a call from her cousin, requesting for a first dance song for their wedding. This call led us to revisit “One”. Mpiwa expanded the song lyrically to encompass English and French, and we co-produced the song virtually over different time zones. The song became “One (Wedding Song)”, and it celebrates and appreciates the union between people in a marriage. In September that year, we released the song on all streaming platforms.

Mpiwa: The 24-hour Creative Sprint was a magical moment that Darryl, Tamane and I will always cherish. Another funny thing is that Darryl and I had worked on another unreleased project after “One.” We never really considered reworking and releasing “One” because it was our first ever song, made in 2020, and the track just felt a little bit underdeveloped. Interestingly, my mum always loved that song and urged me to release it, and I would brush it off, until, one day, my cousin listened to that first version and said she wanted to use it for her and her husband-to-be’s first dance song at her wedding. I was stunned, and I told Darryl, and he was stunned too. We grabbed the opportunity, and we worked right before Darryl headed to Berkeley for his summer programme.

These days, if Darryl and I listen back to the original version, you would see us cringe so hard. We have both grown as producers, singers and general sound designers. To be fair, back in 2020, we loved the music that we created, but in 2023, we both knew that we could recreate the track and love it even more.

Q: What are your future aspirations as musicians?

Darryl: I aim to continue writing and producing songs, whether in collaboration with others or independently, that delve into both my inner thoughts and the world around me. Moreover, I aspire to perform these songs to audiences in Singapore and hopefully beyond its borders.

Mpiwa: I would love to see a time where I can travel even more with my music and performances. So far, my music has taken me to nine countries, and I’m so grateful and in awe. I hope to multiply that number in leaps and bounds.