How Anuv Jain turned everyday feelings into hits, world tours, and a fiercely loyal fanbase

Anuv Jain’s fan base was not built in a day. Even though he has never really had formal musical training, the 'Husn' singer has been singing for as long as he can remember. The 30-year-old picked up the guitar and began songwriting at 16. “I always imagined this to be a hobby, because I did not think that a singer-songwriter was really required in India, or that I could make it big,” he says over a phone call. Jain released his first single, 'Baarishein', in 2016, but it wasn’t until after the pandemic that he decided to quit his job at the family business in his native Ludhiana and take up music full-time. 

Born in Mumbai and brought up in Ludhiana, Jain relocated to Mumbai earlier this year after having spent three college years in the city. His creative process, though, has always been a family affair. “I call my mom my bouncing board,” he says, with a laugh. “I’ll play her something or tell her a bunch of ideas for a new song, and she’ll tell me what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes, when my sister’s visiting, she throws in her two cents too,” he adds.  If one were to characterise Jain’s music, they would call it simple but intricate. He amuses himself by how easily he can “deceive” people, and often uses the word “complicated” while describing his songs. Jain composes all of his songs on the guitar. “I don’t really have a band—it’s just me with my guitar, my notebook, and my mom,” he explains.

“Every word I have ever written comes from a personal space. I’ve had some insane experiences in my life, and I love to observe people and write about my immediate circle, too,” Jain says while adding that his songs don’t talk about big stories with grand gestures of love—they are more realistic: “They have an everyday sort of feeling to them.” When we ask him about something he finds difficult to write about, Jain muses, “Not to sound like a cocky narcissist, but I could write about anything.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds, “I have been struggling to talk about myself and who I am as a person. I would love to write more about that, maybe.”

Love and lyrics

Jain got married to his long-term girlfriend, Hridi Narang, this February. Before the interview, he requested to avoid questions about the marriage, and we didn’t want to pry, but nonetheless, we ended up talking about how it has changed the way he writes about love. “You become sort of like an open book,” he shares, adding: “There’s no hiding anymore. I’ve written about longing and distance before, but now I want to write about comfort—the kind that comes from being with your person.” His latest single 'Arz Kiya Hai', in collaboration with Lost Stories’ Rishab Joshi, is the fifth track of the music show, Coke Studio Bharat Season 3. “Bro, it’s one of my most favourite songs that I’ve ever made,” he says cheerily. “Working with Coke Studio Bharat is a big milestone for me.

When I came to know about it, I was almost euphoric, and I wanted to give them my best performance,” he adds. And so he did. The track has racked up 43 million views on YouTube, 63 million streams on Spotify, and almost 900k Reels on Instagram while this story was going to press. And, even though his songs often make the rounds of our social media feeds, virality never even crosses Jain’s mind when he is making them. “My initial focus is to make a good song that is a story in itself. “Once the song is done, then we move to numbers because see, I am a business guy. You have to make sure that the song is big enough because there is a lot of money and hard work that went into it,” he says. A criticism that follows Jain is that all his songs sound exactly the same. He takes it on the chin. “I’ll try to do better if that’s what people feel, because I know I’ve read about this as well,” he says. “But I also think that a lot of this criticism would go away if people listened to my entire discography rather than just a few songs, or a few seconds of it on Reels.”

He goes on to list them: “'Antariksh' was pretty much a rap song, 'Meri Baaton Mein Tu' is a rock song. I also released a Punjabi song with AP Dhillon called 'Afsos'. I try to do my best, but there’s always more to be desired. And I’ll keep working towards making my songs sound more distinct.” After his Guldasta tour, which concluded in January last year with one of his biggest sold-out shows in Mumbai at NSCI Dome, Jain has an upcoming tour called Dastakhat, forming a trilogy of tours, following the success of Dastakein (2021) and Guldasta (2023). The tour will kick off in January next year in ten cities across India, and will subsequently lead to the beginning of his global tour spread across North America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, the UK, and Europe, marking his biggest tour as an independent artist yet. Looks like the love isn’t waning anytime soon.

This piece originally appeared in the November-December 2025 print edition of Cosmopolitan India.

Photographer: Pranjal Asha 

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