Sky Blue and Unstoppable: The World of Simrit Brara

By Alina Halai for Young N’ Loud Magazine

Simrit Brara was five, maybe six years old, when she told her mom she was going to be a pop star.

Not that she wanted to be one. That she was going to be one. There’s a difference. Kids who want things are still deciding. Simrit had already decided.

That certainty has followed her through everything – through public school music programs in metro Detroit, through vocal competitions, through a full-time corporate career she’s still running in parallel, through a studio catalog she’s been quietly building, one intentional release at a time. The childhood dream didn’t fade. It just got more specific.

The name was never a costume

There is no stage name. No alter ego. No separate persona she puts on before she steps in front of a mic.

Simrit Brara the artist is Simrit Brara the person. She made that call consciously; because for her, making music isn’t a performance of a different self. It’s an extension of the same one. Being in the studio, recording vocals, crafting a song that lands, it’s natural. She uses the word instinctive. It’s in her bones. Creating a fictional name for that part of herself would have felt like a lie.

There’s something worth sitting with in that. A lot of artists build a stage persona as protection, a layer between who they are and who the audience sees. Simrit chose the opposite. What you hear is who she is.

Raised on Bollywood, trained in Detroit

She grew up in metro Detroit, the child of immigrant parents, in a public school system with arts programs that were actually funded. That last part matters more than it sounds. Access at the right age shapes what you think is possible. Simrit got that access early, and she used it.

It’s where she first learned music history. Where she found her first real creative community. Where she started to understand that singing wasn’t just something she did at home to Bollywood records – it was something she could be serious about.

The Bollywood roots are real and they stayed. She grew up dancing around the house to those songs, absorbing the emotion and texture of a musical tradition built on feeling everything at full volume. That didn’t go away when she transitioned into English vocal lessons. It folded in.

At 19, she walked into a professional recording studio in Dearborn for the first time. The studio had deep ties to the Motown scene, which meant the room itself had history in the walls. She still remembers exactly how it felt. Not just the experience of recording – the smell of the place, the weight of what had happened there before her. She describes it as feeling alive. Like she wanted to be part of that world.

She’s been working toward it ever since.

The Rihanna education

Ask Simrit about her influences and she goes straight to Rihanna.

Not just as a fan, though she was obsessive about it. More as a study. She was drawn to the emotion and attitude that lived behind every Rihanna vocal – the confidence, the texture, the sense that Rihanna always knew exactly how much feeling each moment required and gave it precisely that. No more, no less.

The first cover she ever recorded in a studio was Diamonds. Her producer used it as a teaching moment, pushing her to actually listen – not just to the melody but to the small choices. The phrasing, the control, where the emotion builds and where it pulls back. She had to learn how to recreate that feeling in her own voice without just copying it.

That session taught her something she still applies today: singing is closer to voice acting than most people realise. The notes are the easy part. The hard part is understanding what each moment is supposed to feel like, and then making your voice do that.

Sky blue by design

Simrit describes her music as sky blue. Calm, open, uplifting. She writes about things people recognise — confidence, imposter syndrome, love, friendship, growing up – and she’s deliberate about keeping the emotional register light even when the subject matter is real. She wants people to walk away feeling better than when they pressed play. That’s the whole point.

In 2026 she’s been releasing one single a month, each one exploring a different stylistic lane – pop synth, pop alternative, pop EDM, pop ballads. The styles shift but the feeling stays consistent.

The creative process usually starts with a Google Doc. She’ll open it in the studio, write down themes and words and emotions from wherever she is that day, sometimes pull up old music videos to study how a song was structured or how an emotion was built. She connects with how Michael Jackson talked about writing – the idea of opening yourself up and letting the song come through rather than forcing it. Most of her best ideas arrive when she stops pushing and just listens.

Living the double life

Simrit is not just a musician. She also has a full-time corporate job.

She doesn’t bury that fact. It’s part of the story she’s actively trying to tell – that you don’t have to choose. That the dream and the day job can coexist, that showing up for both is its own kind of discipline, and that other people doing the same thing deserve to see someone further along the path who kept going.

The challenge she does talk about honestly is social media. Not in a complaining way – more in the way of someone who has looked the problem in the eye and decided to figure it out rather than resent it. The music industry now requires artists to also be content creators, marketers, and community managers. She’s learning all of it. Testing what works. Staying curious about it even when it’s frustrating. Because the alternative – opting out and hoping the music finds people on its own — isn’t really an option anymore.

Her producer Rich Zahniser has been the other significant shaper of this phase of her career. He’s pushed her outside her comfort zone, challenged her creatively, found new places in her voice she hadn’t found yet. The kind of collaborator who makes you better by refusing to let you stay comfortable.

The ritual before the mic

It’s the same every time. “Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.”

The phrase comes from Sikhism. It translates, roughly, to: the Khalsa belongs to God, and so does the victory. For Simrit, saying it before she records is a way of grounding herself in something larger than the session; a reminder that her voice is a gift, that she didn’t build it alone, and that what she’s doing in that studio has weight beyond just the track.

There’s something in the structure of that ritual that mirrors how she talks about everything else. The gratitude is always present. So is the sense of purpose. She genuinely believes she was given this voice for a reason, and that sharing it is the thing she’s meant to be doing.

Not in a grandiose way. In a quiet, steady, I-have-known-this-since-I-was-five kind of way.

The growing catalog

The next single is called Photo Album. It’s about the particular feeling of looking back at a life and feeling grateful for all of it; the accumulation of moments, the people, the version of yourself you can see becoming clearer in retrospect. Reflective and warm and hopeful. Vocally, she’s leaning into the fuller side of her range — richer, heavier vibrato, more expressive delivery.

It fits the year she’s been having. Every 2026 release has been its own world, its own sonic experiment, while still sounding unmistakably like her.

Down the road, she wants to collaborate. She hasn’t yet, and she’s curious about what happens when two creative voices have to find a shared language in a room. There’s a whole part of the process she hasn’t experienced, and she’s ready to.

Success right now is staying in motion. Continuing to create, release, write, show up. Growing the catalog. And eventually – impact. Not impressions on a screen. Real connection. The feeling that someone heard one of her songs on a bad day and felt, for a moment, a little less alone.

She’s been working toward that since she was five years old, standing in her childhood home, dancing to Bollywood records, absolutely certain about what she was going to do with her life.

She’s still certain.

Simrit Brara is releasing monthly singles throughout 2026. Her next single Photo Album is coming soon.