Beat Of Their Song

They say musicians are a different breed, and we concur. The best songs that are put on repeat are the ones that are written from the heart, and five local singer-songwriters share their journey with music, and how life experiences — be it heartbreaks or gender identity — have shaped the way they approach their croons

- Chelsea Tang

ESTELLE LIM, 29

On never losing sight of her goals

She grew up in an age when people still listened to music on radios. During car rides, Lim’s parents would put on disco music, and when she turned five, she’d already performed multiple carsingalong acts — to the likes of the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. The idea of performing, on stage, in front of an audience while singing her lungs out thrilled her. “I would be singing out loud in the car and my folks would just let me,” she says. “Even as a kid, I always knew I wanted to sing professionally one day.”

It’s a childhood dream that bears a resemblance to that played out in American teen sitcom Hannah Montana, which sees teenage girl Miley Stewart/ Hannah Montana (played by Miley Cyrus) living a double life as a student and a famous pop singer. Not surprisingly, Lim did indeed love the Disney Channel production; her musical endeavours were heavily influenced by television, her music-loving parents, as well as her voracious appetite for radio.

Known best by her internet moniker Estelle Fly (a name she signed up with for Facebook then), Lim’s songwriting journey began in secondary school, when she started writing toplines (the melody of a song) and lyrics off the top of her head. “Nothing materialised as I didn’t know how to [back then], but I was always singing to myself along school hallways, or whenever I was alone,” she says. Of course, this was during the mid-2000s, when the realm of record-and-upload on social media had not come into existence yet.