Finding harmony in chaos

Chennai’s Chamier’s cafe, with its white linen draped tent roof and Japanese tea sets, is too posh to stare at celebrities. Yet, for once, it can’t help itself. Heads turn and discreet glances fall upon our table when the curly haired and bearded man ambles in, takes off his backpack, asks for the wi-fi password and offers to split a sandwich.

For Sid Sriram, as everybody in the café knows, is south India’s favourite new voice.

Everything about the 28-year-old singer-composer is unassuming. He is in a crumpled tie-and- dye shirt and a pair of jeans. His handsomely dishevelled look exudes either broke-college-boy or maverick-artist vibes -- depending on what strikes you.

Sriram is best known for his Tamil and Telugu film songs. Music lovers also know him as a seasoned Carnatic vocalist, and a composer. He draws in a cross-section of audiences in each of these spheres — from live underground performances to packed sabhas during the December Carnatic music season, even as he effortlessly switches from denims to crisp white veshtis .

His first solo album, ‘Entropy’ (released on February 6), is a compilation of 12 tracks that fuse elements of Carnatic, rhythm and blues, soul and electronic music.

A voice that can move

“They say your first album tells your life story. The last 10 years of my life have been my formative years,” he says. He describes each track as a “time capsule” of the many influences in his growing-up years that left a profound impact on him. The colliding soundscapes speak of his own musical evolution across genres, he says.

He was just three when he first performed on stage, and instantly felt at home. “From the first time I was on stage, I knew that when I sang, I could move people. And that was going to be my special talent,” he says. Chennai-born Sriram’s parents relocated to Fremont, the San Francisco Bay Area in the US, when he was a year old. His mother, Latha, a Carnatic music teacher, is his guru, and his sister, Pallavi, is a Bharatanatyam dancer.

In control: Sriram has been performing Carnatic concerts since the age of three. R Ravindran

As an Indian kid growing up in ’90s America, Sriram had his share of conflicted feelings about his identity. “One of the things I did deliberately while growing up was to keep different aspects of my identity siloed away from one another,” he says. He was Indian at home and American at school. With music too, he switched between his Carnatic frequencies with his family and jazz, soul, R&B and hip hop with his peers outside. Classic jazz and blues struck a deep chord. He shuffled between Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, Donny Hathaway, Ray Charles, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock on his Walkman. He idolised the American rappers Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West.

His mother took his ‘other’ musical interests in her stride. “I would play her a Kanye West song and she would look past the expletives and appreciate his style,” he says.

At Berklee College of Music, Boston, Sriram studied music production and engineering. That was where he started composing his own music — R&B songs with a Carnatic bit patched in awkwardly at the tail end, “without letting the two interests cross-germinate in any way”. It didn’t feel like he was doing justice to either.

Arriving as a Rahman find

It was in 2010, when he was in his final semester at college and was in India for Chennai’s Margazhi music season, that he first met music director AR Rahman. He later sent the renowned musician some of his original recordings. Rahman got back within weeks. “He had sent me a reference track of him singing the basic melody with some lyrics here and there that they hadn’t finalised yet. All he said was, ‘I don’t want it to sound like this, I want it to sound like you’re singing the blues’,” Sriram recalls. Rahman’s one constant exhortation to him, then and now is to “internalise the melody”. “To this date, I don’t fully know what that means,” he confesses.

Through Skype calls over a broken laptop, they pieced together the idea for Adiye , the Tamil film song from Kadal that brings together fishermen’s folk with the blues and gospel music, a never-before fusion. Sriram marvels at Rahman’s ability to not just identify talent but also “know what the hell to do with it”. When the song released in 2012 ( Yadike in the Telugu dub), Tamil and Telugu audiences were won over instantly.

Besides getting him to work with Rahman, his childhood idol (his mom’s car was constantly playing Roja songs), Adiye set the tone for his future work. “It gave me confidence and courage to go for it all the way, without having to compromise on stylistic vision. It felt right... it became a cult kind of song, which further reinforced the feeling that there was something for me here,” he says.

But it did not lead to more work. For several more years he continued to be seen as a niche kind of musician and vocalist. Gradually, thanks to Rahman again, he sang a slew of hits — Ennodu nee irundhaal in the 2015 Vikram-starrer I (27 million YouTube views), ‘Thalli Pogathey’ in 2016’s Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada (42 million YouTube views), Macho from the 2017 Vijay-starrer Mersal (49 million YouTube views), and Maruvarthai from the 2018 Dhanush-starrer Enai Noki Paayum Thota (72 million YouTube views).

His biggest hit till date, however, is in Telugu. His song Inkem Inkem from the 2018 film Gita Govindam notched a blistering 93 million-plus views on YouTube within three months (to compare, it’s the halfway mark of the 2012 Kanye West hit Mercy ). Inkem Inkem Inkem kavale / Chaale idhi chaaley (Enough, this is enough... What more can I want?), he sings in a voice filled with emotive timbre, sweeping up the listener in a mood for love and longing.

Telugu film director Shiva Nirvana released the full audio of the song ‘Adiga Adiga’, sung by Sriram, a month ahead of the July 2017 release of the film Ninnu Kori only to entice the singer’s formidable fan base in the region to the theatres. It worked. Critics say that Telugu listeners adored his singing so much that they even pardoned his mispronunciations in a few initial songs, given his unmistakable ‘Tamil-NRI’ accent.

The crossover

According to The Hindu ’s Hyderabad-based film critic Sangeetha Devi Dundoo, the arrival of Sid Sriram on the southern music turf brings a freshness that can only be likened to what the Carnatic vocalist P Unnikrishnan did with his iconic debut film song ‘Ennavale adi Ennavale’ (Sun ri Sakhi in Hindi) in the 1994 film Kadhalan . Also a Rahman find, Unnikrishnan quickly developed a fan base that followed him from cinema music to Carnatic sabhas.

“I’m exploring my Carnatic music pursuits in real time. There’s no pretence of being perfect. You have to be spontaneously living it then and there. This is what allows the crossover of audiences from film to Carnatic,” he says.

Sriram noticed that while people initially came to see him performing, soon they started coming regularly to his concerts, querying him about ragas and the other elements of the form, eager to rediscover their roots. “In that way I take responsibility for being completely authentic. People ultimately come for a human connection. I don’t want them to feel what’s happening on stage is a spectacle. They’re a part of it,” he says.

He recalls the time a middle-aged woman walked up to him at Chennai’s Woodlands hotel and told him she had lost her son a few months earlier and it was Sriram’s music that nightly brought her peace and a restful sleep. “Moments like that can get intense. It reinforces my responsibility. I want to make music that heals. I was given a voice that naturally has a certain sense of pain in it. I know the impact I want to have. There’s a long way to go,” he says.

Sound of amalgamation

Sriram’s solo album ‘Entropy’, with its seven bar beats (instead of the multiples of four the ear is used to) and electronic glitch noise, is no doubt a difficult listen. He likes to compare it to a Jackson Pollock painting, where different colours of musical forms are all colliding vibrantly. “That meeting point when they collide is violent but also really beautiful. For me it really allowed me to come to terms with the fact that I’m not a monolith. I am all the different shades of my identity. For the first time, with this album, I was able to articulate the sound of it,” he says. In a country where the boundaries of fusion have been pushed little since the Colonial Cousins in 1996, Sriram hopes his audience will perceive the layered subtleties he has to offer and be willing to expand their understanding.

Mixed tape: Growing up, Sriram was influenced by rappers Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar

“My biggest fear is that I’m going to look back five years later and see that I’ve got comfortable doing the same thing. I never want to feel that sense of comfort,” he says.

“ Confused and chaotic is how it all started and now it has to end... This is the state of entropy, and all you can do is hold on ,” he croons in his title track ‘Entropy’. His fans are happy to hold on.

He will tour Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Hyderabad on February 13-24 besides embarking on a US and Canada tour in March to promote his album and perform live to a largely global audience who don’t know him yet. Is he nervous? “Yes. The challenge is to develop connection and trust with the audience such that they’re not impressed, but moved,” he says.

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