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Sezairi is “domesticated and old”, and that’s fine by him

“There are so many things that married men get away with, I’ve realised,” said Sezairi in his usual jaunty, tongue-in-cheek fashion.

“There are so many things that married men get away with, I’ve realised,” said Sezairi in his usual jaunty, tongue-in-cheek fashion.

“Like what?” we asked. “Like speaking to women — they’re just so comfortable around you,” the singer-songwriter, whose full name is Sezairi Sezali, exclaimed. “The first thing they say is, ‘You just got married, right? Oh, so sweet! How was your wedding?’ Wow. Women have never talked to me this much ever before!”

Oops. We had fallen into that trap ourselves. One of the first things we had said to him in greeting was, “How’s married life?” It’s just one of those things you do when someone is still considered a newlywed — the 29-year-old married his girlfriend of seven years in January.

One thing’s for sure: Marriage hasn’t dulled his razor-sharp wit, which we had the privilege of enjoying even back in 2009 when he was a Singapore Idol contestant and, eventually, its winner. In fact, it came as a surprise to hear that he hadn’t spent his whole life fending off chatty women.

“I don’t talk to a lot of women in general. I suspect I might be really good at it,” he said. “But we will never know now, right? Because I’m married!”

It’s the world’s loss and his wife’s gain, obviously.

Sezairi is back with his latest EP, titled Sezairi, which he says is deeply personal. While his new single, “Fire To The Floor”, is an energetic track about “the thrill of the chase”, the rest of the songs are all about his long and committed romance — and some of the sentiments are so real, they hurt.

HOUSEBROKEN HUSBAND

While his last few albums were about trying to please others, this one is about catharsis, Sezairi said. The songs written about his wife are a catalogue of the ups and downs of their relationship. “It’s not a happy album,” he said. “It’s not like, ‘Hey, I met you, and, like, this is crazy, call me maybe’. It’s so real that it took a year for me to be able to have the guts to put it out there.” The album was recorded early last year.

There is one particular song, he said, that his wife “hates” and “refuses to listen to”. But ultimately, he said, she didn’t object to him putting out such a personal album because they’ve both matured.

Still, the songs are so intimate that while recording them in Indonesia, he “literally broke down and cried in the studio”, he said, recalling with a laugh that just before that, his producer and friends had tricked him into drinking a herbal concoction of jamu that was “for women during their period”. When he got emotional, “they were like, ‘It’s the jamu, man’”. In actual fact, “when you’re in the booth and singing these songs that are so real and so close to you ... it’s a euphoric kind of high — something I’ve never experienced before”.

This EP, he thinks, will help people get to know the real Sezairi a little better.

“Up until now, I think people still don’t know me very well,” he said. “If you’ve never spoken to me, you’d think that I’m like, ‘Hello, auntie, hello, uncle. Yeah, thank you for the cake.’ But I’m pretty out there. I’m totally the opposite. I’m a nice guy, but I do a lot of naughty things. I can’t tell you what they are, you’re a reporter.”

It was only recently that he discovered that “people think of me as a quiet, bring-home-to-meet-the-parents kind of guy”, he said. Social media helped him break that perception. “When I started using Snapchat, I think my personality started to seep through. People were like, ‘I didn’t know you were so funny’.”

If you follow Sezairi on Snapchat, you’d have noticed that his snaps are inundated with cats. They are, perhaps, a symbol of how love changed his life. He used to be afraid of them, but grew to love them because his wife owned cats. He’s now a proud slave to not one, but six rescued cats, calling himself a “domesticated and old house husband, doing laundry and ... scooping poop all day”.

And that’s fine by him. “I think when you’re nearing your 30s, it’s sort of that way. You stop reading 50 Shades Of Grey and start reading 50 Ways To Improve Your Feng Shui, or 50 Ways To Declutter Your Life,” he quipped. “But I feel like working on yourself is always the best kind of working on something. I’ve been trying to work on something all these years and I forgot to work on me.”

BRANCHING OUT AND BLOSSOMING

Last year, when he ventured into acting — he was in the movie 1965 and the musical The Emperor’s New Clothes — “that was me working on me”, he said. “I felt that it was all a necessary part of my journey. It’s not really about being an actor or a musician. It’s really all about the story you want to tell. If it’s amazing, I’ll do anything to help you tell that story. You want me to be a part of an installation art piece? If it’s a great story, it’s a great story. It doesn’t matter to me. We are all artistes and we have to stop thinking of the boundaries.”

It has been a journey from wanting to burn up every floor and thinking “I’d be able to do anything”, to becoming “more zen”.

“I think maturity comes with not trying to be that crazy genius. With everything that has happened, I feel like I’m a bit more whole than I was before,” he said. “Years ago, I still felt like I needed to prove something, like, ‘I’m going to be the best’. Now, it’s sort of, ‘Meh. I know who I am and where I want to go’. So, I don’t listen to another local artiste and go, ‘I’m better than you’. On every level, I take myself a lot less seriously now. I think that’s really important — you need to take yourself seriously enough to be able to push yourself, but not seriously enough to criticise yourself into crumbling apart.”

He knows he has come a long way since he was somewhat a reptilian aspiring singer; when, at 21, he “didn’t have any meat on my bones and I was walking around with really tight T-shirts, baggy pants and an Afro. My mother-in-law once described me as a cicak. She was like, ‘Oh, he looks like a lizard’”. He laughed.

“But as we went along, I sort of blossomed. Yeah, I think I grew into myself pretty well. I can say that because I’m a married man, you see.”

Fire To The Floor is available now on Apple Music, Spotify and iTunes. “Sezairi” is available for preorder at https://lnk.to/SezairiTunes.

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