For a celebrity musician, Bipul Chettri is not all that great at being famous. He’s taken ages to come into the limelight. Having been so engrossed in classical music for over a decade and a half, mastering every chord and guitar thrum, he doesn’t seem to think it a necessity to explore the world of stardom and popular attention. And so, it’s quite possible that he’s still getting the hang of everything—from the all-seeing but never-flinching cameras’ eye to the popular attention that he’s attracted first from his Soundcloud release Wildfire/Dadhelo to his debut studio album, Sketches of Darjeeling, released last year. That notion, however, does not apply to Chettri’s Soundcheck Series, a sequence of YouTube videos of him and his fellow musicians performing raw, acoustic previews of the new songs he has been composing in a hotel room somewhere.

Take his Siriri video with Kiran Nepali for instance: it is not your standard music video, and hence its apt description: “Bipul Chettri’s jam-style rehearsing session with Kutumba’s Kiran Nepali”. It doesn’t get any more elaborate than that; and that’s perhaps why the title: Soundcheck Series. But the impromptu video comes across exceedingly well. It has already gotten over 81K views—and rightly so—even without tight frames, colour or a directed narrative.

The video serves to eliminate the distance between Chettri and his eager audience everywhere, bringing them much closer to the process of composition and collaboration, all of which usually go unnoticed when the packaged versions come out later. YouTube is full of such videos—cover songs, unplugged sessions and bedroom jams—some crafted but others not—and yet this hotel-room video does not quite seem to fit this category. It lacks the crisp, fine-tuned audio of a studio-recorded single, and yet a few crucial elements are at play here that deepen the bond between the singer and his audience, and make this preview of the forthcoming number more compellingly honest, true and relevant.

The soft black-and-white clip begins with the singer-songwriter plucking the guitar strings in a mellow but rapid melody, shortly before the song starts with the lines “Siriri hawa bagyo sustari/Ekanta duniya ma feri malai udai lagyo”. The lines on Chettri’s forehead crease deeper as his fingers quickly shift between the chords. The video pans left towards Kiran Nepali, who is carefully watching the progression of chords and listening to the tune develop a momentum. By the end of the second verse, as Chettri’s strumming peaks with energy, Nepali pitches in with a complementing tune on his sarangi, his fingers shifting as fast as Chettri’s, both jamming and creating a flow—using their eyes and subtle nods as context cues. It is a moment of improvisation for the famed sarangi player, although one can hardly tell, with the two different sets of strings in a playfully enchanting harmony—until you read the description of the video. That’s the first element.

The second is the lyrics itself. We all recognise the genius of Chettri’s colloquial and unvarnished lyrics. This one is not so different from the rest of his previous songs, although the words here are even less elaborate and characterised by a greater simplicity. It may be described as an extended metaphor of four-and-a-half minutes, one we can, as Nepali individuals, relate to without much effort. There is nothing new to understand or to learn, but everything to connect with and settle into. The gist is as ambiguous as it is precise—we are all aware of our life taking us, silently, where it is supposed to take us; there is an acknowledgement thereof that there is not much we can do to object to our fates. Just listen to the chorus: Jadai Chu Kata Tira/Bagechu Aakash Nira.

The third and most crucial element is the intimacy of the video, the manner in which it ushers the viewers almost into the video’s frame and puts them at only an arm’s length across from Chettri, who possesses a disarming and sometimes aching acoustic quality—both vocal and instrumental—and a penchant for penning evocative songs; he’s a genre-gem who shines in all aspects of the singer-songwriter-guitarist tradecraft. The Siriri video does not feel at all like a house-made, Adobe Premiere-rendered and MacBook-edited expensive production: all that is not needed to forge the intimate bond between Chettri and his admirers. The video’s raw and evolving nature allows for a translucence and familiarity between the singer and listeners, as opposed to the distance they would feel between other artists belting out their most cherished songs.

When all of these minute elements subtly work together in cohesion in any video that accompanies an equally well-crafted song, it certainly makes a mark, and though informal by the standards of mainstream media, gets nicked into our hearts for a long, long time. For a more conscientious and tasteful listener—who, in this case, would be a member of the global Nepali diaspora—there couldn’t have been a more sincere, engaging and reflective YouTube video of Bipul Chettri singing than this video of Siriri, articulated and tailored exactly as it should have been.