NEW YORK, NY.- Niki — Indonesian pop songwriter Nicole Zefanya — was 11 years old when she saw a Taylor Swift documentary that changed her life. “That memory is just a core memory of mine,” she said.

Swift’s 2010 “E! True Hollywood Story” pointed Niki toward the kind of career she could have herself, one that now encompasses songs that have been streamed hundreds of millions of times and concerts that turn into fervent singalongs. Her third full-length album, “Buzz,” will be released Friday, followed by a world tour that comes to New York City’s Central Park SummerStage on Sept. 13.

“I’m from Jakarta, and somehow I’ve made it all the way here,” Niki said via video from her Los Angeles apartment. “Sometimes it is just mind-boggling how this is the story I get to tell.”

Niki, 25, casual in a pale-gray sweatshirt with blond streaks in her dark hair, was speaking from a room that held electric and acoustic guitars, ring lights for video shoots, a high-quality vocal microphone and a stolid upright piano. One of its creaky pedals is heard on “Paths,” a gracious, low-fi post-breakup song on “Buzz” that muses, “Though it didn’t last, I hope our paths cross again.”

There’s now an entire songwriting generation of Swift disciples — among them Olivia Rodrigo, Clairo, Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams — who have learned to conjoin self-expression, craftsmanship, ambition and diligence while navigating studios, stages and social media. What these musical progeny have in common — even those from half a world away — are both an artistic spark and a firm work ethic.

Niki started piano lessons at 5 and was a precocious solo singer at the Christian church her family attended; later, she led the chapel band. “Music was always familiar to me; it was always there,” she recalled. “I was always the baby that got dragged up onstage to sing the final thing before everybody left for Sunday lunch.”

The Swift documentary showed the young Nicole Zefanya that music could be both an emotional outlet and a profession. “I saw that she wrote songs for a living,” Niki said. “So I said one day to my mom, ‘Hey, can I get a guitar?’” She immediately starting writing her first song, “which really was just me discovering how to rhyme words.”

“After that, I could never shut up,” she added. “I feel bad for my mom to this day, just having to sit through all of the inner workings of my mind, like, ‘Oh, that’s very good, honey.’”

Zefanya was 15 when she won an online contest to open a Swift concert in Jakarta. In her dressing area before the show, Niki said, “I just see this slender arm poke through the curtain and just peel it back, and she goes, ‘Hi, I’m Taylor, nice to meet you.’ And I just froze, like, oh my gosh, I’m seeing Taylor Swift in the flesh. I remember not being able to say anything to her.” (They took a picture.)

Soon afterward, Zefanya — like countless musical teenagers in the 2010s — started her own YouTube channel, nzee24, singing covers and unveiling her own songs. English was her favorite subject at school, and she delighted in polysyllabic rhymes. Unlike many YouTube bedroom pop creators, she didn’t just strum and sing — she assembled multitrack productions.

Niki continues to produce or coproduce all of her songs. “She’s a great producer,” Ethan Gruska, who coproduced many of the songs on “Buzz,” said in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. “My job usually, with her, is to take things that are well thought out and sounding really great and scale up. It’s almost like color correcting.”

Zefanya accepted a scholarship to Lipscomb University, a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, knowing the city is a music-business hub. During her freshman year, a song that she wrote and uploaded to YouTube at 16, “Little Souls,” caught the ear of Indonesian rapper Rich Brian.

“I cringe whenever I hear that song,” Niki said. “It was too long. It had no coherent structure. And for some reason people really enjoyed it. I think it was the genuine honesty.”

Brian brought her music to 88rising, an American label and management company that cultivates Asian and Asian American songwriters performing English-language pop. When she signed with the company, she dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles to record as Niki. She took down her YouTube channel, and her early singles for 88rising positioned her as a pop-R&B songwriter, backed by electronics and eager for romance. One single, “Lowkey,” has racked up more than 468 million plays on Spotify. Her 2020 debut album, “Moonchild,” had more somber ambitions, with moody synthesized tracks and high-flown metaphors.

In the isolation of the early pandemic, Niki reconsidered her teenage songs and decided — glancing toward Swift remaking her early albums — that some were worth reclaiming. In her bedroom she had sung, plainly but gracefully, about high-school insecurities and heartaches.

For her 2022 album, “Nicole,” she reworked some of her YouTube songs and wrote new ones in their spirit.

The songs resonated worldwide; “Backburner,” “High School in Jakarta,” “Oceans & Engines” and “Take a Chance With Me” have each been streamed more than 100 million times. But Niki’s perspective was changing.

“‘Nicole’ is unapologetically just so saccharine,” she said. “When you’re 18, you think, ‘This breakup is cataclysmic,’ you know? I’m 25 now, and I was 17 then, and my frontal lobe is developing as we speak. I would hope I’m a lot more reasonable nowadays.”

Some songs on “Buzz” deal with a more recent breakup. Niki sings about a relationship that ended after “four full laps around the sun” in the intricately syncopated “Blue Moon.” In a chugging rocker named “Colossal Loss,” she vows to play “the blame game” and adds, “I’m happy to report that petty feels pretty awesome.” Niki reproaches, “Did You Like Her in the Morning?” in a delicate waltz.

“She’s very calm, very levelheaded,” Gruska said. “It’s cool to see that somebody who is so even can access the tempest of emotions in an artistic way.”

The sound of the new album downplays electronics in favor of hand-played instruments — guitars, drums, piano — as Niki looks back to West Coast music from before she was born: Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell. For Niki, Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” is “the best song ever written.” The dualities of that song echo through “Buzz,” as Niki seeks balance.

Many of the songs on “Buzz” are about turning endings into new beginnings. The album opens with its title track, a catalog of hopeful moments: “It’s the anticipation when the amps turn on/Just cables and crackle,” Niki sings. A prerelease single, “Too Much of a Good Thing,” sets a casual flirtation to a strutting bass line: “I get the feeling that this feeling isn’t one meant to last anyway/So what do you say?” And in “Tsunami,” Niki sings about an overwhelming, elemental infatuation.

If American pop is a musical language that has conquered the world, Niki still finds her Indonesian roots within it and has delighted in playing to audiences of Asians and Asian Americans who have thanked her for representing them. “Take Care” is one of the songs on “Buzz” that she produced and played entirely on her own. It’s about a couple going separate ways; Niki sings, “You take someone’s clothes off/And someone takes me home.”

She came up with a bass line on her guitar, topped by chords that she played by strumming a paintbrush across an acoustic guitar, the essence of subtlety. After finishing the song, she realized that her vocal melody uses a scale from Indonesian gamelan music: pelog, a set of seven notes usually played on gongs.

“As I was writing it, I didn’t even think twice about it. It was just like, ‘This feels like the melody that I want in there,’” Niki said. “It just flows out of me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.