What began as a simple acoustic guitar demo evolved over a year and a half into a meticulously crafted masterpiece, with over 60 versions explored before landing on the final cut. We are talking about “Vienna,” the latest single from Aaryan Shah and his highly anticipated album ‘Do You See The Birds, Too?. This track, described by its creator as one of the most challenging to produce, is a haunting blend of dance-pop, acoustic, and synth elements that defies easy categorization.
Beyond its infectious melody lies an intensely personal narrative—a reflection on toxic relationships, unrelenting yearning, and the struggle to let go. For the artist, “Vienna” is not just a song; it’s a cathartic exploration of love, loss, and the complexities of human connection.
Since his emergence in 2016, Indian-American singer-songwriter Aaryan Shah has built a unique space in the music industry, seamlessly blending future-facing R&B, stark soul, and nocturnal pop into a sound that is unmistakably his own.
With a discography that includes critically acclaimed projects like The Arrival (2020), The Dark Ages (2020), Codex (2022), and A Love Letter to LA (2023), Shah has amassed nearly half-a-billion streams, driven by standout tracks such as “Demon Time,” “Mania,” and the viral sensation “Renegade,” which sparked a TikTok phenomenon with billions of views.
Beyond the studio, Shah has proven to be a multifaceted artist, gracing stages at Paris Fashion Week and the GRAMMY Museum with equal ease. Now, with the release of emotionally charged singles like “Budapest,” “Interlinked,” and “Vienna” from his upcoming fifth studio album, Do You See The Birds, Too? Shah is stepping into his most ambitious chapter yet.
As he puts it, ‘Do You See The Birds, Too?’ is nuanced. “It attempts to balance the highs and lows, and maybe shows that healing isn’t a linear journey.”. It’s a Rorschach test for listeners, inviting them to find their own meaning within its themes of chaos, peace, and healing. Inspired by the artist’s journey with bipolar disorder and the process of finding stability, the album challenges the notion that healing is a linear path.
You just released “Vienna,” a deeply emotional song with heartbreaking lyrics. Can you tell us about the creation process for this track and what it means to you?
Vienna maybe was the most difficult song we worked on for this album. It’s interesting because you wouldn’t think that a “pop“ song like this one would be the most challenging, especially considering that so much of my catalog has such intricate production and arrangement. But Vienna was tricky because it started with what felt like such an undeniable melody to us and I had to see it through. We started with an acoustic guitar demo, but I knew very early on Vienna was meant to be a dance-pop-acoustic-synth song and, potentially, the lead single on this album. It took us about a year and a half to get to the version that we have now – maybe 60 versions or so. With a song like this or Intoxicated on the last album, it’s so easy for people to assume that it has the least substance, or was the easiest to put together because it’s the easiest to digest. The truth is that I’m balancing so many things when I go about a song like this. I’m thinking about making a record that can transcend language, so I have to think about it phonetically pretty early on. I’m thinking of the writing structure itself so that on some level, it maintains its form, but the production gives us an opportunity to experiment and keep you on your toes.
Ultimately, as much as I can try to get this down to a formula, the reason Vienna took so long was that I needed to live a little more life to know what to write about. The song is about yearning and about a toxic relationship, whether that be romantic or with substances, and it’s about needing to let something go, but not being able to. It makes me think a lot about my first love in my teenage years, when you don’t really have an idea of what love is supposed to feel like, and you’re so blinded by the idea of someone that you really think you’d die for them.
I really can relate on either side of this song, because I’ve been the person that someone needs to let go of, and I’ve been the person that can’t let go of them.
What was it like working on the music video for “Vienna”? What did you want to convey visually to complement the song?
The music video killed us in a completely different way. I really thought once we got to finishing the song in Summer 2024 that the painful journey of creating something that I love so much was behind me. But then we got to the music video. We had just finished an intensive shoot, post-production, and a quick turnaround for Interlinked – and while that was one of the shortest timelines we’ve ever had, it left us with an even shorter timeline of three weeks to create Vienna from scratch. The core team typically starts with Michael, my director, Lauren, my manager, and myself. Soon after, we loop in my Director of Photography, Elias, and start building out our crew. We had days, down to the hour, to figure out what story we wanted to tell. And I think the expectation on some level is to show some sort of love interest, but that’s never really appealed to me. I think at the heart of the song, in a way that we could only tell you visually, is that this is about addiction. I found my North Star in this profound animation on YouTube, which I’m sure many fans would recognize, of this bird taking a drug over and over again until the substance no longer had any sort of effect on it. And over the course of that video, it’s tragic to watch this bird not only chase something that ruins him, but eventually doesn’t give him the feeling that it used to the first time that he took it. There’s something so gutting about that cycle. We found our version through some sort of crystallized, futuristic, dystopian substance that I keep injecting into myself, breaking off, and leaving in my body until there’s no life, there’s no energy, and there’s no real chemical alteration left. The production was close to 16 hours with the hard work of so many people.
“Vienna” is part of your new album, “Do You See The Birds, Too?” What inspired the core concept of this production?
I always looked at this album as a Rorschach test. I think what you make of it tells me about where you’re at in your life, and maybe in your own journey of healing. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in 2023 and started taking medication for it a year and a half ago. Knowing myself and how I create albums, I probably would’ve written a narrative arc that starts with living unmedicated and the journey to finally medicating. But the silver lining of waiting 2 years between releases is that it gives me time to figure out the right story to tell. And this one starts at the point of medicating. I think Birds is nuanced. It attempts to balance the highs and lows, and maybe shows that healing isn’t a linear journey. Maybe it’s not the destination at all. That nuance was the intention — and why I think of Birds as my Rorschach test.
It’s built on symbolism. It asks a simple question that can be interpreted in so many ways. It’s worth asking what the birds represent. It’s worth asking who I’m asking. It’s definitely worth asking what my motivation is behind asking.
The album consists of 11 songs that address themes such as chaos, peace, and heartbreak. Is there a common thread that runs through each track, or do you think each one tells a different story?
I do think that each song serves the narrative in a different way. There’s a character arc that you can feel, and in that, you can almost divide the album into acts. If you group Budapest, Vienna, and Vantage Point, they are 3 songs, unintentionally about my love life, that come from different angles. But maybe the central theme is about needing to let go. Whether that’s in the form of acknowledging someone only wants you when you’re at your weakest, yearning when you don’t want to anymore, or having perspective on a failing relationship that the other person doesn’t — it comes through in my eyes.
For many, the music on this album is one of the most valued and inspiring elements. How did you come up with this particular sound?
It feels like a natural evolution from A Love Letter to LA. When we created that album, there was so much anger and resentment. Sonically, there was so much to prove. Or, at least, Kysiko and I felt that way. We acknowledged that this genre raised us and still is a core part of our foundation, but also felt oversaturated and tired. We egged each other on, knowing that nobody was really gonna stop us from pushing boundaries, and created an album that felt like the greatest work of art we could make. It was cathartic and exhausting. Going into Birds, we just didn’t feel like there was anything to prove. I’ve been in a different place since that release, and I needed to let go of that anger. I needed to move on, and I hope that’s what you feel when you listen now. What Love Letter did for me as an artist, I’ll never be able to express, and so much of that carries over. Like wanting to become a better writer and producer and creative overall. Birds sound larger than anything I’ve created, but only because that’s what it needs to be. Not because I need to prove that to anyone.
Why did you decide to use the concepts of fission and fusion as thematic pillars of the album?
Fission & Fusion are bookends. As are Half Remembered Dream and A Love Letter, or Ephemeral and Eternal. Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors — so naturally I try to pay homage to Inception, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer throughout my catalog. There was something intriguing about using nuclear fission as a way of illustrating the volatility and chemical imbalance. It’s the process of stabilizing through medication. It’s funny to me that what you expect out of Fission is what you get in Fusion, and vice versa. It adds so much color. Being in your mid-20s and operating as a functional adult, dealing with depression in a more long-term way is a new kind of low. And one that doesn’t sound like my earlier work. There’s how I dealt with it at 19 and how I dealt with it at 24, and they’re now forever etched in my discography.
The album’s concept poses an intriguing question: “If I’m at the most stable point in my life, but I can’t feel it, does it really matter?” How did you arrive at this reflection, and what do you hope listeners take away from it?
A lot of the second half of 2023 went into the concept of the album and that meant really defining the thesis. There’s a lot of contrast in this album and I wanted that to make sense. Embracing that maybe both things could be true at the same time. Chasing peace and stability is part of growing up and that looks different for everybody, but what I really wanted people to take away is that you really can experience both things at once. Like you’re both the healthiest and most removed from yourself you’ve ever been. You’re the most at peace and the most unhappy you’ve ever been. I don’t know if it has to be taken as dour as it sounds, but it’s been comforting to tell myself that it’s okay if I’m not doing the best even though I should feel that way in theory.
How has your sound evolved from your early work to ‘Do You See The Birds, Too?’ What have you learned along the way?
The Arrival, my first studio album, was deeply rooted in this darker pocket of R&B. The Dark Ages focused on storytelling and for the first time had a score as a standalone song. There were some orchestral elements that pushed me a little further than what I had been creating before. Codex experimented with genres and bolder production, which had mixed reception at first, but completely shaped my sound and is now a favorite for many fans. A Love Letter to LA is where I think we took the most risks. We deviated from R&B, from the trap production elements except for songs like I Was Good to You, and embraced the cinematic nature that existed from the very beginning. The album was brooding, built around its narrative, and pushed those production elements as far as we could. Birds take my favorite parts of that and go further. The choices exist on songs like Fission, where the production goes off-grid and crescendos into this grandiose, orchestral, brass-heavy outro. The experimenting between genres is so transparent, to me at least, when you realize that I Used To Have Strings, Budapest, Vantage Point, and Fusion are somehow all on the same album. I didn’t want it to feel jarring either, so everything was produced, recorded, and mixed in a way that they all feel like they should co-exist, and that they support each other.
I’ve been an “Album Artist” since the beginning. I grew up on that. So every chapter has just been about finding my learnings from the previous one, finding where I have room for improvement, and working tirelessly on mastering that. I think the most important lesson I’ve learned is that I need to be extremely honest and authentic about where I’m at in life. As much as I grow out of my phases and look back at my earlier work in a new light, feeling more disconnected from it than ever before, I love those songs for what they are and what they were in my life at that time. The songs that feel true to who I was at the time, even if I no longer feel that way, still hit me because they’re so fucking honest. I chose to be vulnerable and in doing so, created a time capsule for myself. I now perform those songs on tour and see how they’ve done the same thing for so many people. So as long as I continue to make choices for myself, tell the stories important to me, and stay honest about it in the process, I’ll feel successful. At the very least, I hope someone in the future can listen to this album and understand what my life was like in my early to mid-20s — because I chose not to hold back.
Is there a song on the album that stands out as your favorite, and what makes it special to you?
It’s like trying to pick a favorite child. And I don’t mean that as a cop-out. But to take over 2 years and come back with 11 songs, every song has to be so intentional, thoughtful, and personal. There’s something about Fission, and Your Life Was Never Meant To Be A Punishment. Both songs feel like some of my favorite songwriting. Both have strong messages. The production of Fission feels unlike anything I’ve done before, and I would love it if I’m still performing it 50 years from now. The piano outro on Punishment will always get me choked up. I’m so proud of every song on Birds, and it’s hard when each one means something different to me, but if I can try to look at this from the 50-year perspective, those 2 might be the songs I’m proudest of.
To close this conversation, we’ll use a fragment of one of his most recent Instagram posts where he shows the strength of his honesty as a human being and serves as support for all who need it, when talking about his bipolar disorder. “It’s important to me that I can represent an illness that is severely misrepresented. It’s important to me that I can shed light on my struggle with mental health and normalize how nuanced all of it really is. As I write this, I hope you love me for the person I am, and understand me on a deeper level”.