Chronic illness derailed his career. Now Nikhil Dasgupta returns with a new song

This is an exclusive song premiere, part of WBUR's effort to highlight New England musicians.

For Nikhil Dasgupta, "Heaven Knows” was a long time in the making.

The story began one day in 2019 when Dasgupta got a concussion. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal — people heal from head injuries all the time — but he didn’t get better. Over the course of an arduous, years-long recovery, he gave up on his dreams of making it as a professional musician.

Then last year, almost on a whim, he decided to submit a video of one of his songs to NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. Dasgupta’s performance of “Heaven Knows” caught the attention of WBUR’s panel of judges, who singled it out as one of the standout videos in our search for a favorite Massachusetts entry to the Tiny Desk contest. (That honor ultimately went to the Lawrence hip-hop trio Glasshouse.) I interviewed Dasgupta in September for a story about his Tiny Desk entry, and how his music was impacted by chronic illness.

The shout-out from WBUR spurred the Boston musician to revisit a studio recording of “Heaven Knows” that he had put aside.

“ It was a little bit of a prompt to be like, ‘Maybe I should be putting more effort and energy into trying to figure out how to be a musician in my new circumstances,” Dasgupta, 30, said.

The video that Dasgupta submitted to the contest was lo-fi and off-the-cuff: recorded on his phone, just his voice and an acoustic guitar. It was nothing fancy, which was the whole point — just throwing his hat in the ring, because why not? But it worked. The intimacy of Dasgupta’s performance, the absence of any camera tricks or distractions, drew you in.

The studio recording of “Heaven Knows,” which drops Feb. 6, leans on the intimacy of Dasgupta’s Tiny Desk Contest performance — you can hear the strings squeak as he moves his hands up and down the fretboard — but amps up the energy. Warm vocal harmonies, minimalist piano and tasteful percussion lend heft to the song, a yearning expression of unrequited love expressed in cataclysmic metaphors. The space-agey sounds of a modular synthesizer add an eccentric touch to the arrangement.

The synth parts were added by Dasgupta’s former bandmate Sam Kyzivat, a composer from Maine. Their collaborative style is unfussy: Kyzivat added his contributions to the arrangement and returned the song to Dasgupta. “ It's just sort of beautiful chaos that he sends back [to me], and then my task is to kind of identify which pieces I want to use where,” Dasgupta explained.

Editing himself was harder. For a long time, something about the song wasn’t clicking, and Dasgupta couldn’t figure out why.

“ I think this is the third time that I've tried to play banjo on a song,” he said. “And then I'd be listening to the full mix and be like, ‘Something isn't right. Something's not working.’ And I'd go in and … mute the banjo and be like, ‘Now it works.’" (Needless to say, there is no longer any banjo on the track.)

It was tricky to nail down his vocal track, too. After dozens of attempts to perfect his delivery, he went back to the very first take, which he hadn’t even intended to preserve. Something about that loose, unselfconscious performance was more powerful.

“When you're not thinking too hard or trying too hard is when you get the honest performance, right?” Dasgupta said. “I think that's ancient wisdom at this point.”

In the end, he simply had to get out of his own way. He’s trying to carry that attitude forward as he takes the next tentative steps toward music-making again. Most importantly, he’s careful not to obsess over metrics: how many streams, how many tickets sold. He considers it an achievement just to put his music into the world.

“It feels small,” Dasgupta said. “But in a healthy way.”

Nikhil Dasgupta's single "Heaven Knows" is out Feb. 6.

Note: The audio for WBUR's music premieres comes down after the track is released. You could still listen to the track via the streaming service embed above.