Ritika splashes into the musical stratosphere with ambient first single “For The Fish”

by Anushka Dakshit

photos by Victoria Huerta

“Swallow me whole,” was the first line that Ritika Sharma wrote in her dorm room at the University of Georgia. She wasn’t sure where it came from, but she wanted to explore it further.

Then Sharma saw the fish on her sweatshirt, and on her arm, her fish tattoo. At the time, she felt like she was seeing fish everywhere. The fishes were like angel numbers for Sharma. Months later, her manifestations led her to write, produce, and release her first single, “For The Fish,” which was released on June 9.

The single, a dreamy pop symphony filled with arpeggiated guitar over Sharma’s soft melodies, is an introduction to Sharma’s versatile production skills and precise harmonies.

The Athens-based Indian American 20-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer feels that growing up musically gifted was a special thing. She first started playing piano when she was four, got her first guitar in the fifth grade, and now knows how to play eight instruments in total. With the skills of an orchestral ensemble under her belt, her heart lies in producing, which she started doing in the eighth grade.

Despite releasing her own music, she’s more interested in staying behind the scenes, and her goal is to become a songwriter and producer for other artists. Currently a marketing major at UGA, Sharma wants to learn more about the music business.

“I love being able to tell other people's stories and get across what they're trying to say,” Sharma said. It’s not the fame she wants, but the community and connections to make what she loves. “I wanna be like Benny Blanco. Like, who cares?” Sharma laughed.

Over quarantine, Sharma started the practice of picking at an object and writing about whatever came to mind. She also tends to latch onto things, a gift when it comes to songwriting. The first song she ever wrote when she was 10 years old was called “On a Farm” – it makes her think that she could’ve been a farmer in a past life.

“Growing up, I had zero experiences, so I got really good at writing about nothing,” Sharma said.

Inspired by Declan Mckenna’s “Brazil,'' which was about Brazil’s poverty and corruption surrounding the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Sharma is drawn to writing that is subtly political. She wrote “For The Fish” with intention – as a queer artist, she made sure not to include pronouns and wanted the song to be universal.

“I like songs like that where it’s a distraction song,” Sharma explained. “‘For The Fish’ slams you with darker, sadder lyrics and I think it does have that darker undertone, at least with the way I'm singing.”

“For The Fish” is a song inundated with emotion. It’s about a relationship and love. But Sharma was sick of feeling so much, to the point that writing about anything would help her expel the intensity inside of her. So, she put all her energy into letting the song absorb those emotions for her, serving as a distraction, absolving her of having to confront what she was going through at the time.

“Half of my emotions, I don’t comprehend, and I think that’s a bad thing,” Sharma said. “I think I had been feeling a lot of things constantly, and I was like, ‘Gosh, give me something with nothing.’”

Sharma started producing “For The Fish” in February. She didn’t use anything else except for her guitar and computer. She used the advice she’d gotten from a production class she took last semester – she used her best instrument, in this case, her voice.

She made her guitar sound like a piano with a couple of knobs, clapped and turned down the pitch to make them sound like castanets, and used stock plugins on GarageBand, her arpeggiated plucking accompanied by insulated bass and pinging harmonies.

“I think that's important because I feel like people who are trying to produce music often find that it's inaccessible to make a quality good sound,” Sharma explained. “Any sound can become another sound.”

Once Sharma wrote the first line of the song, she was invested in committing to the underwater ambiance. She likes to do production mirroring, where one mirrors whatever is said in the lyrics.

“I was like, ‘if I'm going to do this, I'm gonna go full out fish, like I'm becoming a fish,’” Sharma said. “And I was like ‘How can I hear this in the production and the songwriting?’ So I kind of just latched on to the fish idea.”

The production consisted of 130 tracks on GarageBand. Sharma listened to oceanic sounds and watched ocean videos on YouTube to make sure that the underwater ambiance wasn’t overwhelming. She’d go to crowded places, like the subway, to listen to the song. If certain elements made her even more anxious instead of calming her down, she would know to turn it down.

“It was really like an alone process,” Sharma said. “You just have to trust yourself.”

After recording a voice memo of the first verse she wrote for the song, she posted it on TikTok on a whim. 500 likes and 40 excited comments on the video were enough to reaffirm her and encourage her to keep working on it. Within ten minutes after posting that first TikTok, she had written the rest of the song.

“Validation was definitely something that made me want to actually produce the song,” Sharma said. It wasn’t validation that the song was good – Sharma already knew that. It was validation that Sharma’s music could be a vehicle for listeners to process their own emotions and experiences.

After posting TikToks of small bits of songs, more people started to give her input. One person suggested that she add bubble sounds to “For The Fish.” Another person reached out to her and told her how her music had helped them with processing grief.

“That kind of opened my eyes,” Sharma expressed. Her community on TikTok is small, but a couple of people caring about the music she made encouraged her to fully finish “For The Fish” and continue to work on finishing up other projects.

With “For The Fish” being Sharma’s first single, it’s given her several lessons about the music-making and marketing process that she’ll take with her as she releases more music in the future.

One of the things she’s learned is that it’s okay to accept help from others.

“I was in this mindset of like, ‘it all has to be by me,”’ Sharma lovingly mocked herself. “But now I'm kinda like, okay, collaboration is actually like a beautiful thing, and we can make something even better.”

Sharma is currently working on an EP, which will be released on September 22.

While some of it sounds like “For The Fish,” other songs encompass a plethora of genres. “I think my music is for people who love all kinds of music and are just passionate about listening to music,” Sharma said.