COLORSxSTUDIOS

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.

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.