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The Oxford Student sat down with Patra, a second-year English student at Oriel College who recently released a single titled “Aftercare”. While ostensibly a song borne from a situationship, it’s also something more – a reflection of uncertainty, of blurred lines, and of the longing for something that may never be fully defined. In our conversation, she unpacks not just the song, but the whirlwind of emotions, heartfelt friendships, and late-night recording sessions that brought it to life, whilst reflecting on her musical journey and the myriad of ways in which music has become inseparable from who she is.
Speaking about her song “Aftercare”, Patra recalled drawing inspiration from her real-life situationship in writing and producing this song.
In one word, the song is about a situationship. I think the song in itself, its structure and sound, embodies how it feels to be in one. You have that slow, tentative opening which is very tone-heavy, and then you have this drop. I wanted that to feel like how it is when you’re in a ‘will they, won’t they?’ kind of situation, and you almost feel like you’re running out of time.
“It’s a very honest song. It’s based on an actual person, and the person it’s written about knows that it’s written about them. I might even have sent the first line of the song as a text to them. And I think everyone should send this song to their situationship.”
“Aftercare” is admittedly an interesting choice for a song title, something that Patra herself pointed out. Reflecting on what “Aftercare” means to her, Patra references her lyrics in ruminating on “what comes after?” “It is inevitably the question that weighs on my mind, but it’s also the question that nobody wants to answer, and that nobody can answer. After everything goes down, what you want is that care. But if you’re in a situation with such blurred boundaries, you can’t necessarily ask them to care after.”
I was curious about the entire production process of the song, as well as the time it took for the song to come to completion, and was surprised to find that it all happened within the span of a month or so – specifically, 3 to 4 weeks.
“When I’m saying we didn’t sleep, I mean it – we didn’t sleep. The production involved me and my friend, Yicheng, literally locked up in the attic of his house for 3 weeks trying to figure out production through trial and error. We wanted to figure out how to get the song to sound professional, or as professional as we could get it to sound.”
Besides production, the entire song was also conceptualized and written within this short frame of time. Patra talks candidly about her songwriting process, stating “I’m constantly going through some kind of emotional turmoil or mental break. I wrote a good chunk of the song on the Oxford Tube back from London – I have this book, which I call my book of chaos, and every time I have ideas I will write something down in there.”
Of course, she could not have done this alone. When asked about the people she did it with, Patra mentioned “These guys – they’re such a big part of it. People think it’s just me, and that’s insane, because it’s not. So we’ve got Jianguo, who does operations and communications, Yicheng, who does production and also deals with all the communications and contacts. Then we have Shraddha, who does marketing, and Isaac, who’s this amazing photographer and graphic designer.”
“We kind of all blend into one”, she joked, adding that she’s really “fortunate that (she) enjoys their company anyway.” While starting something so exciting with your close friends is a dream for many, Patra also admits that “it can be really difficult navigating a friend-colleague relationship”, though she adds “we only started this project because we trust ourselves that we’re smart and dedicated enough to put all our effort into it”.
“Working with them has taught me bounds and bounds of things. But above all it’s taught me – and I know this sounds corny – how to be less scared of sharing parts of myself with others.” Because songwriting is such a personal process to her, Patra recalls having to share her “deepest fears and anxieties” with people she “didn’t really know at the time”.
“I think this whole process has taught me to take myself less seriously. I think we all get way too in our heads about these things, but honestly – who cares? It’s fun, and so many people have come up to me being like ‘why is this so relatable’? So I’m glad I wrote about this topic in a song.”
Besides writing and releasing her own music, Patra is heavily involved in the music scene in Oxford, herself performing in two bands – We Should Sleep More and Dot’s Funk Odyssey. “Being around such amazing musicians all the time is really cool to me. It’s very inspiring when I see people who’ve been so good at their craft, in an almost terrifying way.”
Speaking about her plans for the future, both for herself and her team, Patra admits “I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket, but this is definitely more than a hobby. I have a whole fantastic, amazing team with me, and we’re going to run this like a business. We are going to put our full effort into it for an amount of time, whether that’s one year or three years, and really take it seriously and see where it’s going.”
We already have songs in the works, and we even have full demos recorded. My brain is like a tornado – there’s so many things going around in it, and there will never be something that I don’t want to talk about or put into songwriting.
Patra reflects on her own experiences throughout her life, and how they seep into the music she writes: “My inspiration for my songs come from loads of things, like me having moved abroad at a young age. The genre of ‘Aftercare’ is DnB, which is a genre in the UK and something I only learned after moving here. So my song is about love, but it’s also very much a delineation of my move here, because it wouldn’t have been possible without me coming to the UK. Maybe DnB would have found me anyway, but I also think it captures how it feels for me, growing up in two different places.”
At the very heart of it, my conversation with Patra felt like a love letter to the one thing she was so passionate to discuss – music. She tells me about her fascination with different genres of music, and the reluctance to limit herself to just one: “I like jazz, I like country music, and I could make an emo track if I like. There will be elements of me in every song – I might not be the most technically trained singer, but my voice will always be unique to me, because it’s mine. So whether I put more jazz influences into it, or garage influences, my songs will always have elements of me in them.”
Music, in her own words, is “for everyone – family, connection, friends, good times, and bad times”. In a way, music also acts as a “lifeline” for her: “Whenever I experience emotions in extreme, whether I’m particularly happy or particularly sad, I think that if I didn’t have my book to whip out and write about it, I actually don’t think I could handle it. It’s like – my emotions need to come out. And that’s kind of what music has become now for me.”
After all the talk – about her song, her friends, her team, and her journey – Patra tells me, quite simply, that “if I couldn’t write songs, I would be a lot unhappier than I am. And when I write music now, it just feels like the easiest thing in the world.”
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