During a high school dance, a student at the Pingry School in New Jersey approached the DJ and requested the song “Phoenix.”
As the crowd sang along to the lyrics, which croon, “It’s like I am a phoenix / I know I can do this / And I’m burning my path every day / You can’t hold me down,” Melissa Tungare stood, shocked to hear the words of their song being embraced by others.
“I was actually so excited because hearing someone else sing back your own song to you is maybe like the best feeling of writing a song,” said Tungare, a rising senior majoring in linguistics and East Asian languages and cultures. “Because it’s not only like this person enjoyed it, but this person enjoyed it enough to learn it.”
“Phoenix’s” vast popularity marked a milestone in achievement for Tungare, whose love of music began at a young age. And while “Phoenix,” which was voted as the senior class’ favorite song, might have signaled Tungare as a promising musician, it wasn’t their first foray into songwriting.
That began at six years old with a four-word song addressing school bullies. Tungare had penned the lyrics on a paper they later cathartically crumbled up and put in their backpack. After Tungare’s brother and cousin found the song and later teased them about it, the singer-songwriter stood proud of what they had done.
“Even then, I really used [music] as an outlet [for] the things I felt were harder to talk about,” Tungare said.
Tungare’s songwriting hails from their personal experiences, a move done to base the lyrics on authentic and genuine understandings they know best.
“It really comes from their heart, and they put so much into it,” said Lexi Brauer, a rising senior majoring in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s all very personal and very thoughtful. It’s almost a diary, but in the form of a song.”
Brauer, who has known Tungare for 13 years, recalls their early enthusiasm for singing, such as when Tungare organized a faux “American Idol” contest in honor of the Winter Olympics in fourth grade.
“I feel like I had so many conversations with them about music. And [Melissa] was always teaching me more about it because I didn’t know anything about it,” Brauer said. “They’ll send me the songs constantly, at very weird hours of the night, and then I’ll wake up to it and listen, and they’re always incredible. And I’m very honored that I’m one of the people who get to hear them first.”
While Brauer describes Tungare’s singing as calming, serene and “a great escape,” their long-time music teacher and one of their musical inspirations, Jini June, says it is like “a trip to the moon” because there is no one on earth that sounds like them.
June and Tungare have been working together ever since Tungare was 10 and a half years old. June has enjoyed watching them blossom the past decade, particularly seeing their confidence and fearlessness grow throughout the years.
Both June and Tungare are of Indian descent, a connection that has strengthened their bond in the time they have known each other. Their lessons were broken down into two-parts, with the first half of dialogue discussing what it is like to be South Asian in the music industry and the other half being educational instruction.
After every lesson, June always found it hard to leave Tungare’s house.
“I don’t have kids, but I look at these students, especially Melissa, as my little [siblings],” June said. “I wish that I had a teacher who looked like me when I was coming up because then it would have kind of given me a little bit more of a passport to follow my dreams.”
For June, seeing Tungare rise as an upcoming artist is a testament to their perseverance in a world riddled with judgment and hate and a lack of South Asian representation in the entertainment industry.
“You have to have rhino skin to get over that and rise above that. And yet, they still write, and they still do covers and put them out there,” June said. “They put a lot of thought into what they do. But I’m really happy that they continued, especially with the songwriting.”
June said Tungare is following their dreams with all heart and no fear, and she said that’s what she “would like to see the next generation of South Asians [do.]” And while June has taught Tungare all about piano and songwriting, ultimately, June said Tungare has natural gifts that cannot be shown in textbooks.
“First of all, to write a hit song or to write a great song, you don’t go to school for that. You just write and it comes from your own inspiration. And you don’t go to school for inspiration,” June said. “You don’t get those kinds of ideas to write a song from taking a degree in music. There are other things you can learn with a music degree, but writing a good song is something that comes 100% from within.”
Tungare said June encouraged them to explore their own potential; one of their most prized possessions is a notebook June gifted to them. Now, it has been completely filled with song lyrics and other musings.
Besides songwriting, Tungare has also dabbled in musical theatre and classical piano. While at USC, they made the decision not to pursue a major or minor in music to avoid eclipsing academics with something they love.
Instead, they pursued music on the side, joining Asli Baat, USC’s South Asian Fusion A Cappella group, releasing covers of songs on social media and creating snippets of original compositions on their phone’s voice recordings.
“Often when I’m writing, there’s a moment where I’ll play back the recording of what I just did,” Tungare said. “And this is more of a personal thing, but I’ll just be so excited all of a sudden, and it’s just a feeling of like, ‘Wait, I just wrote that.’ It’s a really exciting moment for me.”
In the future, Tungare hopes to publish their music on Spotify and release an album filled with unreleased personal songs that Tungare describes as more “raw.”
“It would be quite an experience to let people hear that and see that side of me, so I think that those are probably the ones that cut the deepest,” Tungare said. “I think that the [songs] that I released are definitely ones that kind of show who I want to be rather than who I already am.”
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