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Sidharth Sriram talks music, family, and his UAE debut

From Carnatic roots to global acclaim, the singer discusses his creative process, family’s influence, and debut UAE performance at Sole DXB

Published: Tue 10 Dec 2024, 5:02 PM

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Growing up in the suburbs of California, Sidharth Sriram had a very calm and quiet childhood steeped in music. Starting his education in Carnatic music at the age of three with his mother, he regularly sang on stage during family gatherings. However, it was only after his university education at Berkeley College of Music that he knew he wanted a career in music.

In a career spanning over a decade, Sid Sriram has belted out major hits, performed on the prestigious stage of Coachella and continued working on his own music. This weekend, the singer will headline Sole DXB in his first ever performance in the UAE.

Headlining the Second Sole DXB Stage on Sunday, December 15, Sid is one of the most exciting additions to the festival. Chatting with Khaleej Times over a Zoom call, he shared what fans can expect from him, how he is a musical shapeshifter and who his biggest critics are. Excerpts from the interview:

Have you ever come to Dubai before? What can your fans expect from you at Sole DXB?

I've been here a few times for a couple of award shows and while travelling. But I've never performed in Dubai before, so I'm really looking forward to that.

The show that I'm going to be putting on, there's a term that we've coined in the last year, called the hybridist. And it just encapsulates the spectrum of everything that I do.

So the show will heavily weigh on my last English language album that came out in August 2023. That will be a majority of my set but then also will include some new music.It will also draw from my Carnatic background and maybe a couple of the songs I've sung for Indian films.

Every time I'm on stage, I'm really giving people a piece of who I am, because these songs that I write are really pieces of myself in song form. That's something non-negotiable for me and I don't think I know any other way to perform. I can't be dishonest on stage. So I look forward to an audience that's open to kind of go wherever I'm going for this set. And I can't wait for it.

Tell us about growing up in California.

I was born in Chennai and then we moved to the States when I was a year old. So I grew up in the suburbs of California. Just really calm and quiet. I think because of that idle time and space and kind of the boredom, it was a fertile environment to let music be my escape or a mechanism to spark the imagination.

Then I went to college in Boston at Berklee College of Music. That was an exciting point of transition because I was moving away from the suburbs and into a city. Going to Berklee was really cool because I was just surrounded by music all the time and people doing various kinds of music.

It provided me with the skill set that I use today to do what I do. Before that I knew that I had a voice but I didn't really know what I was going to do with it. I didn't know how I wanted to take my culture and mix it in with the contemporary. Once there, I really started making sense and figuring out how I wanted to make music, what it took to do it, the technicalities of it in terms of production and software, microphones and all that.

I always knew that if I was going to make my own music, I wanted it to be unique and not sounding like whatever was already out and that it had to really be a testament to my upbringing. So I think my four years at Berklee was the time where I really got to experiment and start figuring that out, experimenting and seeing what worked, what didn't.

How has your playback singing journey been? It took a while for your talent to be noticed.

I did my first song in 2012 but my career really took off in around 2016. I was 25 at the time and I was in a space where I really needed something to click career wise. So before excitement, there was a bit of like relief that, the journey is worth it and that you start to see the returns on it.

I think my ego initially was definitely feeling really good as it does when you get recognition and then it burns away and it becomes a normal part of your life. I guess the kind of relationship with celebrity and stardom and fame is the very positive aspect of being acknowledged for the work that you do. Then there's also the flip side where you lose a little bit of yourself as it is a different kind of reality. So there has been ups and downs.

In the 12 years I have been in the industry I have changed. My interests have broadened, and over the years, I really kind of started thinking about how I want that stuff to breathe into the other creative pursuits I have.

You sing in a lot of languages. Is that challenging?

The challenge has been just really kind of understanding and internalising the nuance of each languages, phonetically, specifically. But that's also the fun of it, to grow with the languages.

Tell us the working relationship you share with your sister. Is she your biggest critic?

She's a professor at Colorado College and comes from the world of movement and dance.

We collaborate a lot. She's a sounding board for a lot of my creative pursuits. And we came up really kind of symbiotically balancing ideas off of each other. She's definitely the realist with me.

There's no fluff.

But my biggest critic is myself. And also my family. We’re all in this together. My dad manages me, my mom still teaches and is my guru in Carnatic music. So I think they all keep me pretty grounded. They are honest and direct. But they're also the ones cheering me on the hardest.

How was the Coachella experience?

That was a big bucket list for me. That specific performance just made me realise that the only thing that really matters is being hyper present in all my pursuits. That's what I want to make sure people are aware of, you can't put me in this box or that box. It's like, I exist in various ways, and I'm always a musical shapeshifter.

I ended that set with the Tamil Thirupugai, which is a kind of Carnatic piece that is in praise of the Hindu God Muruga. You could tell that most of the audience wasn't from India or South Asia. So they didn't have much of a context for that but the minute I started that piece, a kind of hush fell across the audience. That felt really special.

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