Shayan Italia
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SHAYAN
PIANIST, SONGWRITER, PRODUCER & PERFORMER
Before Shayan's mother died, when he was a teenager, she bought him a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano as a goodbye present. She never lived to see him play it for it arrived a few days after she passed on. Upon unpacking the piano, something quite amazing happened. Shayan placed his hands on the instrument and started playing. It seemed to him as if his fingers had taken a life of their own. It was magical! Just as magical was his sudden gift for writing songs. He wrote so many that, soon, he had--not one or two songs--but a large body of work.
Not knowing what to do with his new-found gift and his ever-growing catalogue of songs, Shayan turned for inspiration to London where his elder brother and first cousins lived at the time. Then, exactly a year after his mother passed away, Shayan lost his father. With nothing to keep him back in his hometown, Secunderabad, Shayan moved to London, In London, Shayan took a loan and enrolled for a sound engineering course at the prestigious Alchemea College of Audio Engineering in the hope that he would learn how to record some of the songs that he had written.
He found to his dismay that recording songs required money to pay for musicians, singers, and studio time, With limited means and loan options exhausted, Shayan was compelled to turn to other ways for financing his passion for music.
Undeterred and accepting the challenge, Shayan resorted to entrepreneurship where he innovatively auctioned a portion of his future earnings on eBay to raise money to record a song . He raised a staggering USD 18,000 in 7 days—many more times the USD 1,000 that had been his aim! He later went on to become the first person to ever raise USD 1 million privately for music (approx Rs 6 crore at the time) which led to the birth of his project FEEL. Offered as a free download, till date, FEEL has garnered over 47 million downloads worldwide purely through underground word-of-mouth and is now under consideration to be made into a Broadway Musical.
Born in the city of Secunderabad (now in Telangana State), Shayan Italia is only one of a handful of Indians to be interviewed by the legendary Sir David Frost as part of his show Frost Over The World. Frost opened the interview with the question "Well, is the new Elton John going to come from India?". Shayan has always chosen to remain away from the limelight for personal reasons. #IWouldStandForThis will be his first ever commercial public release as a music artist on a global scale honouring his mum for the gift of music she left him with.
To learn more about Indian-born pianist and songwriter, Shayan Italia, visit the Shayan Italia Official Website at https://www.shayanitalia.com