Why Sid Sriram’s ‘Sidharth’ Makes Him One of a Kind

In three days, India-born, California-raised singer Sid Sriram will celebrate the one-month anniversary of his latest studio album Sidharth. Though he is hesitant to refer to himself as such, Sriram is undoubtedly a first-of-his-kind musician, or at least he is now with the release of his new LP.

Blending themes from South Indian and Hindu-influenced Carnatic music with prominent American genres like pop, R&B, and alternative, the amalgamation found in Sidharth is the perfect display of Sriram not only as an artist but also of the man he is now.

Born and raised in the South Indian city Chennai before moving to the Bay Area town Fremont, California in his youth, Sriram was always surrounded by and engulfed in music, particularly Carnatic. He would eventually commit fully to musical pursuits by enrolling in Berklee College of Music in Boston, which he felt would aid him in his quest to becomimg a star in the Western Hemisphere.

During this time, 2008-12, Sriram got a quick whiff of what fame via music felt like, as his 2011 cover of Frank Ocean’s “We All Try” went viral on YouTube, now sitting at over 2 million views. However, by the time he graduated, he didn’t feel like the U.S. was ready to commercialize a South Asian musician, at least aside from M.I.A.

So, he went back to Chennai. Taking off in the film industry by writing and performing songs for Bollywood film soundtracks, Sriram found a fanbase that embraced his sound and “fed his ego.”

“I really brought a new energy to the industry over there in terms of how I performed,” he tells American Songwriter. “The way I sing, but also the way I move on stage, was definitely something very new. And that’s a product of me being both Indian and American and having a lot of American contemporary influences that inform the way I perform.”

Practically spending half of his time in the U.S. and half of his time in India from 2016-20, Sriram was reaching a point where his Western ambitions were on life support, even though he’d put out the self-produced, English-speaking album Entropy in 2019.

All of this came to a head, though, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020. Staying at his parents’ home in the Bay Area, Sriram would soon transform his approach to English music while shacked up. This eventually resulted in his rendezvous with indie pop musician and producer Ryan Olson, most notable for his work with Poliça, whom he first connected with over Instagram.

Once pandemic guidelines loosened, Sriram took a trip to Olson’s hometown of Minnesota, and the two crafted some of Sriram’s most meaningful music to date alongside more of Olson’s friends like Bon Iver‘s own Justin Vernon.

“I went there with zero expectations,” he says. “I’d never been to Minneapolis before. So it was like, ‘Alright let’s pull up to this new city. Let’s see what’s up.’”

These Minnesota sessions birthed songs like “The Hard Way,” the third single for Sidharth which Sriram describes as a “kaleidoscopic coming together of different genres.”

“Honestly, near that 2021 timeframe when I first went out there, I was considering just closing shop on English language stuff full time,” he notes. “And through Instagram, I very randomly met Ryan, and that trip to Minneapolis changed my whole life.”

As he continued to fortify this bond with Olson, Vernon, and that entire crew, the now-33-year-old found it much easier to blend his Carnatic foundation with the music he discovered when he first moved to America. Even more so, though, he was able to relieve himself of the many pressures he once faced as a songwriter.

“[Olson] really brought me into this ecosystem and community of warmth,” Sriram says. “[It was] a huge, stark difference from how I’d written songs before. When we were all making music, there was no ego. It was kind of the tail end of the pandemic, so people hadn’t gotten to jam with each other a whole bunch. So everyone was just so happy to be in a room making music. Ideas were flying out.”

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Sidharth would eventually arrive on August 25 of this year, right after Sriram had gotten back home from a brief summer tour with Bon Iver and Poliça. And, though the album has finally brought about the U.S. breakthrough he had always dreamed of, Sriram wants to assure audiences that while his Hindu and Carnatic roots are still relatively prevalent on the album, they fully dictate his identity as an artist.

“I think [Hindusim] is open in a way where you really get to interpret it the way that you want to and take from it what you do,” Sriram says. “This religion was a mechanism for me just to explore spirituality. So, the music I write just takes that same spirit. Spirituality is at the very center of every song, of my whole framework.”

Check out more of our conversation with Sid Sriram below.

American Songwriter: What has the reception of the album been so far?

Sid Sriram: “It’s been good. My intention for it was to have the music open people up. What it did for me in the process of making it was it really opened up a whole bunch of valves within myself that allowed for these emotional washes and breakthroughs and realizations and so on. So, the goal was for that same kind of spirit and ethos to do the same for other people. And it seems to be doing that.”

AS: Why did you go back to India after you graduated school? Why did you come back to the West after that to continue your career?

SS: “My career in India started the year I graduated, in 2012. That was the first time I sang a song for a film out there. Then from 2016 to 2020, I was doing 6-8 months of the year in India, and the rest of my time in the U.S. I started doing that because I had a song that came out there in January of 2016 that really blew up, and I was still trying to make music here. I was just crashing on couches in LA at the time. Nothing was moving over here. My dad started managing me and he was like, ‘Yo, there’s something going in [India], we should go check it out.’ I was dead set on doing what I wanted to do in this part of the world, but momentum takes you elsewhere sometimes.

“Once I started living there, as an adult, especially with my career really picking up, it was a great time for me just form my own roots, build my own ecosystem and circle of friends. … When I went there and started living there and having my own life there, that’s when I worked through a lot of that stuff. I embraced the depth of the roots that I had in that city and that country.”

AS: Bringing all these concepts and genres and influences together, are there times when it feels like more of a concerted effort than a natural inclination?

SS: “Before I made this record, it would feel like I was trying to do it. I really started experimenting with bringing together my Indian classical roots with R&B and soul probably like 10-11 years ago. I started at Berklee College of Music from 2008 to 2012. Around 2008-2009, the seed was sown. So it’s been an over 10-year process of trying shit out, seeing what sticks, and sometimes it feels contrived, sometimes feeling very natural, but never really consistently.

“And with this record, it felt like we didn’t have to try at all. It really just flowed out from every direction for me, vocally. I remember the first jam for ‘Dear Sahana,’ it was myself, Justin Vernon, Aaron Baum who plays the keys, Chris Bierden the bassist, Alex Nutter who did modular synthesis stuff, and then Ryan [Olson] was in the room, and we were just jamming on that chord progression. And I remember doing a vocal part where it transitioned from an R&B soul riff into a Carnatic Indian classical kind of thing. That was the first time where it was really effortlessly and just flowed out without even thinking about it. … It was all flowing from a space of just deep creativity, no thinking really. We finished the album in like, eight months.”

AS: By bringing all these concepts together, do you feel like this combination of unique influences makes you the first of your kind as an artist?

SS: “The funny thing about this is that you can sound really pretentious when you’re talking about yourself. I do feel like there’s yet to be a South Asian Indian artist who has been able to exist, with dimension, in the West. I have so much that makes me me by way of influences and experiences, and I think especially with this album, I was really able to express the whole spectrum without apology or without overthinking it. Just really celebrating the whole thing and everything that makes my identity what it is. I don’t think we as a community have been given that opportunity just yet in the West.

AS: I feel like something that has really helped your music resonate is your songwriting. It very much feels like you’re venting your thoughts on the musical elements that have shaped your artistry, but also making it sound very romantic and making it feel like it has one listener in mind. How did that method of songwriting develop for you into what it is now?

SS: “I like the way you put that. I’ve never thought about it that way, but that does make a lot of sense. I think it’s evolved naturally. My music and songwriting, for me, has always been this cathartic process of trying to understand self and the pursuit of some sort of universal truth and making my way towards that. Or excavating memories, and really examining those to give me some tools to go forward. So I think really, the conversation is a conversation with myself. Really identifying deep resonance points within myself. So when I’m writing the music, I think naturally, that conversation with self can also translate into a conversation with someone else in a very direct, intense, and romantic uncovering of who I am. 

“I would like to think I take a quite intimate approach to songwriting and really bearing all. … With this album, it happened without having to toil over things too much. For a song like ‘Quiet Storm,’ I was in my parents’ spot in the Bay spending days on days just jotting down ideas and then culling from that what can turn into lyrics and such. So yeah, very much a conversation with self that then translates into a conversation outward.”

Photo by Ahmed Klink / Cortesy Orienteer PR