Tanya Shanker’s new EP is all about love in the time of social media

“I would meet somebody online and talk to them, but afterwards wonder if this person was really who they were portraying themselves to be. It would bring up the question — is that who they are or is this an exaggerated version of themselves? The title track ‘CyberFantasy’ is about falling in love with the online version of someone who probably does not even exist,” says Tanya.

Think of modern life set to music and what comes to mind is Tanya Shanker’s recently released EP CyberFantasy which is all about love in the age of social media. The Bengaluru-based musician shares how social media blurs the boundary between fiction and reality.

“I would meet somebody online and talk to them, but afterwards wonder if this person was really who they were portraying themselves to be. It would bring up the question — is that who they are or is this an exaggerated version of themselves? The title track ‘CyberFantasy’ is about falling in love with the online version of someone who probably does not even exist,” says Tanya.

Talking about the inspiration behind this five-track EP, Tanya went to say how she realised people spent most of their time online. “I noticed how the internet affects our personal relationships. We are now citizens of the online world; we basically live there a lot of the time. I wanted to explore that through my music, and that is where the idea came from.”  

At a time when we are drowning in copious amounts of content available to us online, one of the most pertinent problems across generations has been doomscrolling (the act of spending an excessive amount of time consuming news, especially negative news, on the web and social media). “One of the tracks in the EP is titled ‘Dopamine’ and is about doomscrolling, and the dopamine hit that you get from scrolling when you are online for too long.” 

For Tanya, a lot of what she creates comes from her personal experiences, “I can only write about something when I have actually experienced it and am able to look back at it in hindsight,” she adds. 

“I would like to credit Richard Andrew Dudley, my mentor and manager who co-composed and produced CyberFantasy. Two other musicians are phenomenal as well — Jaime Dudley who programmed the drums and Yogesh Pradhan who programmed quite a few instruments on the EP, including the guitars and bass,” says the artiste, who has two other albums as well as a couple of singles and EPs to her credit.

Tanya admits that as a 19-year-old juggling between college and her passion can be quite difficult. “Even though I am used to it by now, that doesn’t make it any easier. With college, I always have a deadline and I also have to squeeze in time for the studio, but I also enjoy it.”