Saara has no patience for the parties. The Las Vegas musician says as much in her R&B dance hit “Clockwork,” where she sings about sloppy women slipping out of their heels and drunken men slipping on their words.
It’s a song of repetition, born out of a love for Kaytranada beats and the nightmarish realization that she’s been stuck in a perpetual loop for far too long.
“I’m in my car, zooming the hell out and looking at my life and thinking about where I’ve been. This all feels very monotonous. I feel like I’m doing the same exact thing every weekend,” she says. “I feel tired. I feel drained. Then I gradually started painting the picture and complaining about what it was that I felt was draining me, which was the same environment, the same music.”
The 25-year-old’s ability to assign that feeling to words, under the guise of an infectiously catchy club beat, places her in a league of young, contemplative artists who have something to say and aren’t afraid to do it while making you dance.
“I remember distinctly where it started. It was my first heartbreak,” Saara says of her songwriting. “It was after I got out of my first relationship, so naturally when you’re 16 and that happens, you feel like the world is fu**ing ending. The things that I would write would be very passionate, and it kind of merged into poetry without me realizing it.”
After graduation, Saara started recording her own music, quickly compiling a catalog of singles that process first loves over lush guitar strings (“Time 4 U”), tackle insecurities (“Bravado”) and explore emotionally unavailable people (“Daisy”).
Those familiar with R&B mainstays like SZA and Jhené Aiko will hear similarities in Saara’s tenderly lilting vocals, but an even greater inspiration has always been Raveena, an Indian American R&B star influenced by Bollywood, Billie Holiday and Bjork.
“She’s such a spiritual artist that I resonate with so much. I love how she’ll intertwine so many different beautiful aspects of our culture into everything that she’s doing in a way that I’ve also kind of aspired to,” says Saara. “I think she’s so cool, and it’s just a cool thing to see a South Asian woman on a f**king Coachella stage.”
The importance of Raveena’s representation— a rarity in R&B— isn’t lost on Saara, who is also Indian American.
“But I don’t think it ever necessarily deterred me. If anything, it excited me,” she says. “Not only is it emboldening to be able to strive to be one of the first people to do it, it’s also exciting to see how I’m able to do it on my own.”
Saara harkens back to her heritage in a forthcoming music video for her single “Daisy,” where she films herself singing while getting her eyebrows threaded in a local shop. It’s something the artist says she’s been wanting to do for years, and while it was tough to keep her composure (“Did you see how bloodshot my eyes were? I’m like, trying not to cry.”), the pain was worth the homage to her upbringing.
“Eyebrow threading shops feel so closely correlated to who I am in such a weird, minor but major way,” Saara says. “When I first started high school my mom let me actually start getting my eyebrows threaded. But obviously it’s a staple of South Asian culture. You go to most threading shops and it’s a brown lady that’s gonna thread your eyebrows and get you right.”
As if she wasn’t already putting herself into her music, Saara has found a way to do it as authentically as possible. In the last few years, she’s performed at various venues, including Sand Dollar Downtown and the Space. And now she’s focused on making more music, possibly for an EP next year. While writing was once something she did in solitude, Saara says she’s getting comfortable inviting others into the process. But in terms of whose opinion she values most?
“I’m working on making it be mine,” she says.
Saara ffm.to/missdaisy
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