By all accounts, musician Sezairi has been having a pretty exciting — or busy — year. The singer-songwriter, whose full name is Sezairi Sezali, recently signed a contract with Sony Music, following the footsteps of fellow local acts The Sam Willows and Trick. Fans can also catch his acting debut in local movie 1965 when it premieres at the end of the month. (He plays a police constable and stars alongside actors such as Qi Yuwu, Joanne Peh and Deanna Yusoff.)

Of course, the singer has more music out this year. He was one of the participants of the SG50 album, Sing, Love, and performed the song Starlight (with jazz singer Joanna Dong), for which he wrote the Malay lyrics. And there’s his new EP, which will be a collection of English songs that he has written over the past six years, all of which were inspired by his wife-to-be, the 28-year-old explained.

“A man’s motivation is a woman,” Sezairi opined, when we asked if his fiancee had served as his muse. Sezairi proposed to his girlfriend of six years, Syaza Qistina Tan on his last day on the set of 1965.

“Men who can have sex with a woman in a cardboard box wouldn’t buy a house. If the Porsche or Ferrari weren’t bait for women, men wouldn’t buy these cars,” he quipped.

The new EP, which is slated for release at the end of the year, was recorded over a period of 10 days in Bandung, Indonesia in collaboration with Indonesian producer Ari Renaldi, who also produced his recent single, Jangan Coba Berlari. Just what’s in it? “The songs that never made it to the mainstream record, the songs that I have been keeping for a long time, the songs that will generally be on the B-sides and are too long for radio. But I felt they really needed to be put on record, because they are songs I really love and am passionate about. And it’s all about one person. The underlying theme is ‘my girl’,” he said.

Sezairi, who was the winner of 2009’s Singapore Idol, continued: “I still enjoy doing pop music, and I feel it is serving the public well. But sometimes, we’ve got to be selfish — and this is kind of a selfish album. In that sense, to this point, I find it is the most musical and the most creative.”

Thanks to his new deal with Sony Music, Sezairi can focus on being creative without having to worry about the bread-and-butter issues that plague most struggling indie artistes. “To be a creative person, you need to be released of the financial and logistical burdens,” he said. “One person cannot do everything by himself. It gives everyone the space to be more creative and concentrate on work, and that is always a good thing, I think.”

As Sezairi adds the finishing touches to his coming EP, he is also on the lookout for more creative projects that he feels are worth doing and that he can contribute to. He is currently committed to a “secret project”, about which he cannot reveal details, although he promised it would put him “out of (his) comfort zone” — just as his experience on 1965 did.

“It’s a great experience to get out of your own shoes,” said Sezairi, who also released a single, Selamat Pagi (Good Morning), for the movie. “As a musician and an artiste, you try so hard all the time to show people you are yourself. You try to be yourself. It’s so difficult to show people you are trying to be yourself. But being an actor, I had to unlearn all these things and try to be someone else. A musician or artiste’s job is to let people into your world.

He continued: “But as an actor, you have to unlearn everything and be someone else. I guess that was the biggest challenge – to play a character as opposed to being Sezairi. But looking at it, I think I did a pretty okay job for my first time. I can see why people get addicted to acting.”

After all his work is done and dusted, the singer will finally marry the woman of his dreams, in what he hopes will be a private ceremony in April or May next year. “We are currently looking at venues, but we are trying to find some place private, where people won’t gate-crash, because it happens,” he said, laughing.

“We are really private people. We just really like to be in the company of each other, eat potato chips and play video games. That is the kind of people we are. We kind of want the wedding to be very intimate — a night for our close friends to remember.”

And who knows, maybe Sezairi’s next album will be inspired by his children.