Features : DonnyJ drops enchanting pop single Savour

While the genesis of emerging artist DonnyJ’s music lies in the rich culture of the Indian classical music he was exposed to as a child growing up in India, it was the Western music he stumbled upon that really piqued his interest.

From buying cassette tapes of artists like Eminem, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears to his acceptance and transformative time at Berklee College of Music––a lifelong dream––music has been a lifeline for the Tampa Bay, Florida artist, who often felt like an outsider and faced several personal challenges.

Now DonnyJ is set to debut the culmination of more than two years of extensive work on his craft with the sublime new pop single “Savour.”

“The foundation of my music was the traditional pop, the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure with some catchy lyrics in between, a nice hook,” DonnyJ says.

After his time at Berklee, DonnyJ moved to Tampa and challenged himself to release a song every week for two years using that formula.

“I continued that for six or seven months and found it absolutely easy,” he says. “It became like drinking water to me. I pushed the envelope a little more and started releasing a cover along with an original song so two songs a week and then pushed it further and started releasing a talk––I’m actively involved in learning about the true essence of life and the mind. It was fantastic while it lasted.”

Along the way, DonnyJ started tweaking his songwriting and is now very much inspired by scoring films, a non-linear format of songwriting.

“That’s what I was captivated by,” he says. “I started incorporating that as a benchmark for songwriting and I added pop elements into a non-linear songwriting fashion. I’ve been evolving ever since and ‘Savour’ is the culmination of this.”

“I was breaking that traditional songwriting format and experimenting with a non-linear way of writing music whilst incorporating pop elements and that experimentation took me into releasing a couple of singles, but it was never the finished product. I didn’t feel satisfied with them––I feel satisfied with ‘Savour.’

DonnyJ’s first intention is to make “exceptional art.” He doesn’t view it as a product or just pushing some beats for people to consume, though he admits his original impetus for making music was monetization, and says that pursuit is why a lot of other artists fall out of the “race” when they don’t strike a record deal or make enough money.

But DonnyJ has a profitable side gig in IT, which removed money from the equation with his music.

“Now I’m just doing it for the sake of doing it,” he says. “Now I’m at this level of purity where I don’t have any ulterior motives with the music I’m releasing. I’m releasing it just for the sake of creating it, and I feel that’s what sets my music apart from the rest.”

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