Global Hitmaker Savan Kotecha Is Backing A Desi Act of His Own
He’s written chart-toppers for Ariana Grande, The Weeknd and Usher. Now Savan Kotecha is backing a boyssband from India—and betting that the next global pop star won’t need to come from L.A
THERE’S A STORY SAVAN KOTECHA TELLS—A MUSIC industry folktale he’s carried since he was 17. Back then, he was just a kid in Texas with a dream, a demo tape and the kind of bulletproof confidence only teenagers are blessed with. He had a group, a few songs and he finally got a call back.
“I love this track,” the executive said. Kotecha was elated—until the man added that he’d just signed another group. Maybe you’ve heard of them: the Backstreet Boys. He wanted to give Kotecha’s song to them.
“I told him, ‘But I have a group. We’re looking for a deal,’” Kotecha recalls. The exec paused, then asked: “What are you?”
“I told him, ‘Indian,’” Kotecha recalls. A second-generation immigrant, his family had moved from Uganda to the US, but he traces his roots to Gujarat. “And he just said, ‘I’m going to be honest with you: no girl in Wisconsin is going to put an Indian guy on her wall. You should just be a songwriter.’”
That line might have broken someone else. Kotecha took it on the chin. “In 1994, in Texas, I appreciated the honesty,” he says now. “He wasn’t wrong—then.”
These days, the rules are different. Kotecha’s not just writing songs. He’s writing the soundtrack to pop stardom.
For the uninitiated, he cut his teeth with Swedish mastermind Max Martin, helped shape the early hits for Westlife and One Direction under the Simon Cowell umbrella, and then hit his stride with Ariana Grande—co-writing smash singles like “Thank U, Next,” “No Tears Left to Cry” and “God Is a Woman.” Since then, his credits read like a who’s who of pop—Usher, The Weeknd, Halsey, Normani, Ellie Goulding, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Maroon 5… even Madonna.
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But it didn’t happen overnight. His rise, he says, was fuelled by a low-key defiance—a refusal to choose between the two worlds he grew up in. “My mom especially was quite upset,” he recalls. His parents were classic software-era pragmatists. “They were so dependent on the Indian community around us. The fear was— ‘What will people say?’” he explains, adding, “They didn’t know anything about the music business; there were no examples of Indians doing this in the West. I get it now—I have kids of my own.”
By the time he was 20, he had left college behind and was flying back and forth to Sweden, chasing meetings with songwriters like Max Martin—who would later become a mentor and collaborator. “Being in a room with Max and [his producing partner] Shellback early on, I just knew something special was happening,” he says. “It wasn’t about churning out a song a day. We’d spend weeks on a song. Every lyric, every beat—leave no stone unturned.”
The result: hits like Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love”, which went global and cemented Kotecha’s status as one of pop’s most reliable emotional engineers. Did he know it would blow up? “We knew it was good,” he says. “But you never know what’s going to become the one. You just make it bulletproof. That’s the goal—craft it until it can’t be denied.”
From Western Hits to Eastern Pop For all his global acclaim, Kotecha held onto one burning ambition: bringing an Indian artist onto the global pop stage. He’s always kept an eye on what’s brewing here. “It’s like having a boyfriend who’s never met your family,” he says. “Then they meet— and it just clicks. That’s how it felt when I started spending time in India, writing and working with Indian artists.”
Most recently, Ed Sheeran’s “Sapphire”—which Kotecha co-wrote and co-produced—blew up in India, especially during wedding season. “Ed spent weeks here, working with tabla, dhol and sitar players,” Kotecha says. “None of it felt like a gimmick. That energy shows in the song.”
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that pop music, he believes, needs stars—not just good songs. And while India’s indie scene has grit and grassroots power, it lacks youth-driven icons who spark mass devotion. “Bollywood has stars,” he says. “But in the indie world? It’s often 38-year-old Punjabi dudes. No offence. But where are the screaming teenage girls? The dorm-room posters?”
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At 45, Kotecha is stepping into something more personal: not just writing hits for the West, but shaping pop in the East. OutStation—the boy band he’s launched under his label Visva Records, in collaboration with Republic Records and Universal Music India— are, as he puts it, “the real deal,” chosen from thousands of hopefuls and shaped by a month-long bootcamp in Goa. “The dreams these kids have—they’re massive,” he says. “But there’s no system to support them, especially outside Bollywood. So many never get a shot. I want to change that.”
He’s not just talking about structure, but belief. “We’ll never have our own Michael Jacksons or Beyoncés if artists only start after college,” he says. “By then, the dream’s already dimmed by society. I want this band to be a signal—not just to kids, but to their parents—that you can start young and dream big."
The five members of OutStation—all in their teens or early 20s— hail from across the country: Bhuvan Shetty from Udupi, Hemang Singh from Prayagraj, Mashaal Shaikh from Goa, Kurien Sebastian from Delhi and Shayan Pattem, an army kid from Hyderabad. None of them are from Mumbai—and that’s the point. “This group was always meant for India’s youth—and we were intentional about not keeping it city-centric,” he says. “You can’t build a real pop culture movement if you’re only talking to South Bombay and South Delhi.”
They won’t be singing in English, and they’re not trying to sound Western. “We’re working with the best Indian composers and lyricists—the songs are in Hindi. The idea is: this band is for us, by us.”
In a streaming-saturated world where “hit” is a moving target, Kotecha knows the music has to cut through. “A great song is still a great song. But today, you can’t just drop a banger and hope it sticks. It has to be part of something bigger—a moment, a feeling,” he says. He’s seen it firsthand with K-Pop Demon Hunters, the animated Netflix hit from Visva Records, which he believes resonated because it was part of a larger story.
For now, the band is in the studio—still finding its rhythm, still learning to move as one. “They’re young,” he says. “It takes time to become a unit. But they’re already recording covers, training, building content. We’re laying the foundation, brick by brick.”
OutStation isn’t just a band. It’s a correction. A reclamation. A kid in Texas once told to stay behind the curtain is now pulling others onto the stage. It’s poetic. Full circle.
What keeps Kotecha hungry after all the hits, fame and money? His answer is disarmingly simple. “I don’t want anyone else to get that call,” he says. “The one I got at 17. The one that said, ‘No girl will ever put you on her wall.’ I want to make sure that wall is real. That the poster’s there. And that it’s ours.”
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