Marshall sophomore releases first single

Arushi Pant knows how to make people feel.

Pant, a sophomore majoring in business administration, released her first single “Lost and Found” Aug. 6. Though this is her first foray into songwriting, Pant is no stranger to the music world — she has been singing since she was five, encouraged by her mother to focus on her public performances and stage presence.

“[Singing] was always something I loved doing,” Pant said. “I want[ed] my first song to be about a story of mine.”

Pant’s focus on personal stories makes “Lost and Found” stand out. From a lyrical standpoint, Pant shifts between the literal and the metaphorical, the individual and the universal feeling of losing something.

In the opening chorus, Pant sings, “I keep misplacing things that mean the most to me / Like the teddy bear that my dad gave me when I was three.” Teddy bears and pinky promises are some of the material memories that Pant alludes to throughout the song. But listening further into the lyrics, she takes this physicality and swiftly transitions the notion of “lost and found” into a metaphor for grief and the process of dealing with loss.

The poignancy and delicacy of the subject is palpable, as Pant opens the chorus with “I’m searching for answers, I’m searching for us” and closes with “I look for you in a crowd hoping I’ll find you there in the lost and found.”

In conceptualizing this song, Pant relied heavily on personal experience to inform the lyrics of “Lost and Found.”

Pant’s writing process began on a Google Doc, where she outlined simple memories, such as singing and dancing in a car. From there, she organized lyrics based on those real events and set them to chord progressions — suggested by Pant’s producer and USC alum JaJa Tong.

The two met in USC’s Songwriters’ Forum, and after hearing each other’s work, arranged a collaboration.

“Arushi is such a talented singer,” Tong said. “She genuinely loves it too, so I couldn’t be more happy with her performance.”

Beyond its written aspect, another undeniable strength of the song is Pant’s tone. Her depth and emotion is instantly recognizable within the first words of the music.

Pant’s true love of music dates back to her earliest singing days.

“She just epitomizes the passion and love for what she does,” said Rebecca Skaar, Pant’s music teacher for the past 11 years. “She was just a born singer.”

This degree of passion, compounded with Pant and Tong’s consistent effort, are what allowed Pant to release the single in a matter of months. According to Tong, the two started working at the beginning of 2023 and had the song released by August.

“Lost and Found” relies heavily on Pant’s vocals over the background instrumental, a choice that came rather late in the production process.

Tong shared that the duo changed the entire production in June from a contemporary piece featuring drums to a more stripped-down version reminiscent of Adele.

The simplicity of the melody and the purity of Pant’s vocals reiterate the humanness she strove for in the music. Having Pant’s voice as the primary sound over the gentle chord progressions in the background forces the listener to internalize Pant’s lyrics, and the message it conveys regarding loss.

“It talks about the stages of grief that you have while losing someone … there’s anger, frustration, sadness,” Pant said. “And then finally, you get closure; you don’t move on, but you move past it in some sort of way.”

Some of the most poignant lyrics occur in the final chorus, in which Pant sings “I’m not searching for answers or searching for us,” rather than “I’m searching for answers, I’m searching for us,” as she did in the first two.

While this song is built on Pant’s personal experiences, there is a universal sentiment addressed about waiting “until we meet again outside the lost and found.”

“When we are kids, we lose a lot of materialistic objects. But, we can always find and replace them,” said Pant. “But losing [a person], you can’t really replace them.”

“Lost and Found” ends with a combined feeling of hopefulness and nostalgia. The final, solitary line — “so until we meet again outside the lost and found” — addresses the longed-for closure after experiencing the grief of losing someone. It is a universal ending, with a remarkably human touch felt through the smooth resonance of Pant’s vocals.

After addressing life, loss and grief, a sense of closure is precisely what Pant intended and felt herself when she completed the song.

“After writing the song and writing all my thoughts, I felt like I got that closure,” Pant said. “And that’s the most powerful thing about music.”