Chennai, India-born artist Sid Sriram doesn’t believe in separate identities, just one kaleidoscopic lived experience

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Chennai, India-born artist Sid Sriram doesn’t believe in separate identities, just one kaleidoscopic lived experience

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A year after he was born in Chennai, India, Sid Sriram relocated with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, his mom taught him Carnatic music, a centuries old form from Southern India. While this was the genre that “raised” him, he was naturally exposed to R&B, soul, and rock while growing up in the U.S. Last year, he referenced all of these styles on his album ‘Sidharth’, creating a sound that is entirely his own and reconciling his multifarious cultural influences in the process. “It’s really helped me in getting rid of this idea of having separate identities,” he says. “There’s just one lived experience, one spectrum, and it’s kaleidoscopic.”

 

In line with his debut A COLORS SHOW performance of ‘The Heir’, we sat down with Sriram to find out more about how his work in the South Asian film industry has influenced the music he makes today, the profundity of self understanding, and why the best music transcends all barriers.

What is Carnatic Music?

Carnatic music is a centuries old classical form from Southern India. It is based on ragas: there are thousands of them, and each one is like a melodic universe unto itself. Carnatic music is highly rhythmic, and spiritual too. A lot of the stories it tells are pulled from Hindu and Vedic scriptures.

On a more visceral level, Carnatic music is very much sung from the gut. You use your full voice. It’s like water or air to me. Carnatic music has been there from when I was born and shaped the way I view everything.

Have you ever questioned your love or appreciation of the form? Sometimes kids want to rebel against things that their parents have introduced them to…

It’s a very technical, complex form. I definitely went through a period of disillusionment with it. It felt like this big iceberg that I was up against and that I couldn’t get perspective on. There were two paths I could take: I could let go of the form and shift my focus to writing my own music, or I could go through rigour of chipping away it on a daily basis. I chose the latter, and I’m infinitely better for it.

R&B was also a big influence on you when you’re growing up, right? 

When I was a kid, we’d go back to India most summers. One summer, we stayed in the U.S. and I was bored out of my mind. My parents got me a small FM radio with headphones, and I just wandered around the suburbs with it. One day, I discovered a local jazz radio station. That was what introduced me to jazz, BB King, and the blues.

That was right around the time when sites like Limewire were popping up, so I started downloading a lot of Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway, and Aretha Franklin—old school soul singers that had beautiful textures to their voices. For the first time in a Western form, I heard vocal inflections and embellishments that reminded me of Indian Classical music. There was also the same deep, raw soulfulness that I felt when singing Carnatic music. This idea helped me build a bridge between my two cultures.

Did you ever feel torn between these two cultures? 

Every time I’d go to India there was always a period of adjustment—I needed time to adapt back to cultural cues and so on. Then, when I came back to the States, I felt like I was different to everyone else.

In 2010, when I was at Berklee College of Music, A. R. Rahman won the Best Score and Best Original Song Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire. He’s from Chennai like me and we speak the same language. For the first time, someone that looked and spoke like me was being celebrated at the highest level in the West. It was a big deal for me. Funnily enough, he gave me my break in Indian films a couple of years later.

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Tell us more about Rahman and how he supported your career.

A. R. Rahman is the biggest musician out of India. His first film score and album came out in 1992, so his music has been the soundtrack to my life since I was a kid. I sent him a cold email when I was in college and he responded. Two years later, I recorded a song with him. It was really successful, but it still took me a while until I got my break. In 2016, I released another song with Rahman that changed my life. That’s when I started living in India for six to eight months of the year.

There, you started working as a playback singer for South Asian cinema. How has this experience influenced the work you make as a solo artist today?

I’ve experienced a whole spectrum of music in India that’s outside of my genre and comfort zone. Every time I sing a song for a film, remnants of it stick with me. It’s really informed the depth with which I approach writing my own music.

On another level, rising to a certain level of stardom in India and doing shows to 15 to 20,000 people has really shifted the way I approach music. Once I saw how it reaches and affects people on such a massive scale, it humbled me and reminded me of the gravity of what music can do in this world.

You released your debut EP, ‘Entropy’, in 2019. How did you want to introduce yourself as a solo artist outside of everything you do in the wider universe of Indian cinema?

I’d gotten to a point where I felt this deep need to express aspects of myself that I wasn’t able to in my other creative ventures. I locked myself in a room and produced the album from start to finish over the course of six months. I can’t really listen back to it anymore—I can hear how young I sound in terms of production. It was the beginning of ideas.

These ideas surely fed into the creation of ‘Sidharth’, your sophomore album blending Carnatic music with R&B and rock that came out last year. 

Definitely. It’s taken me 10 years of experimenting for Carnatic music, R&B, and rock to enter my bloodstream. When we were making the track ‘Dear Sahana’ for the album, I began singing a vocal inflection that started off like a soul riff and shapeshifted into something more Carnatic halfway through. At that point I realized that blending wasn’t something I had to think about anymore. It had become a subconscious, effortless thing that was embedded in my system.

People talk about “channeling” and being a vessel. When I made this album, I switched off my brain and emptied myself. By doing that, inspiration hit in abundance. All of my ideas, influences, and cultural undercurrents came together and flowed seamlessly. Making this album affirmed for me that identity is not siloed and fragmented. It all comes from one source.

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“I want to be a testament to the fact that there is goodness in the world…

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… and that music is a profound form that can bring people together in divisive times.”

In your film work you’ve mostly sung in languages such as Tamil or Telugu, but ‘Sidharth’ is in English. Tell us more about how you experience singing in different languages. 

English is the language that I think and dream in. It’s the language I go to to create poetry, lyrics, and to express myself. Since releasing ‘Sidharth’, I’ve started to try writing in Tamil more. It’s a very different process. It feels like learning to walk. I haven’t gotten to the point where I can really dig into concepts in the way that I can in English, but that’s fun too. There’s a certain simplicity that gives me scope to grow.

Earlier this year, you sang the Tamil song ‘Sivanar manam kulira’ at Coachella. It was the first time that the language had been sung at the festival. A video of it went viral on social media. Why do you think it connected with some many people, Tamil-speakers and non-speakers alike?

That song is a specific kind of Carnatic piece called a Tiruppugazh. My mum taught it to me when I was eight or nine and it’s lived with me since then. During the tour for my album, I ended every set with ‘Sivanar manam kulira’. It’s a deeply spiritual piece focused on the Hindu god Muruga, so closing the set with it always feels very meditative and profound.

Performing at Coachella was a really big moment for me, for obvious reasons. Some shows I perform feel transcendent, and that was one of them. I remember introducing myself, where I came from, and feeling a deep sense of pride. And then I started this Tamil piece. Even though the audience was primarily non South Asian, everyone just went silent. I’m sure most of them didn’t understand the words, but the best music transcends any barriers.

Another big moment for you this year was performing at the Sydney Opera House.

It was awesome. The lineup was super dope. There was me, Priya Ragu, who is also a COLORS alum, and an artist from the UK called Raf Sapera who’s of Punjabi descent. The three of us represented very different parts of the South Asian experience as it exists in 2024.

Hopefully performing on COLORS was another 2024 highlight for you! Tell us about ‘The Heir’, the track you performed for your show. 

I wrote this song almost ten years ago. My career hadn’t fully taken off and I was couch surfing in L.A. It’s about my relationship with existentialism, freedom, and autonomy, and how we define these things before we are hit by tidal waves that completely shift the way we approach the world. There’s a melancholic strain to it, but there’s hope too.

It’s called ‘The Heir’ in reference to royalty. By owning yourself, you give yourself… not a crown necessarily, but the gift of self understanding. That’s the most profound feeling you can have.

‘The Heir’ is my version of soul song. It’s simple and doesn’t have a lot of elements, but it allows me to tell a story in naked way. The fact that it still feels so relevant to my life even though I wrote it a decade ago is a testament to the fact that, even with all of the shifts, evolutions, and crazy things going on in the world, there’s something universal and eternal in the quest for truth.

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What are your ambitions for the next decade? 

Up until recently, my fan base was mainly South Asian. After putting the album out and touring different parts of the world, I’ve seen a shift in the turnout to my shows. My audience is becoming quite diverse. My vision for the future is to continue this process of bringing people of different backgrounds—whether in terms of culture or gender—together into one space. I want to constantly be a testament to the fact that there is goodness in the world, and that music is a beautifully profound form that can unite us in increasingly divisive times.

Sid Sriram is a Chennai, India-born artist whose A COLORS SHOW performance of ‘The Heir’ was released on 12th August 2024. You can watch it on our YouTube channel.

 

Text: Emily May
Photography: Ahmed Klink

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