Singer/songwriter/producer Sid Sriram represents a collision point of radically different worlds; a true hybridist. Sriram was born in Chennai, India. His family moved to the San Francisco/Bay Area suburbs when he was one. His duality of cultural roots is integral to Sriram’s identity. Carnatic music is his foundation and fountainhead. He graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Music Production and Engineering. He is a singular force in the world of Indian film music.
For Sid Sriram, there is a quality inherent in the Carnatic music of South India that he describes as “universal truth.” The 33-year-old singer/songwriter has spent years imparting this truth to audiences in India and across the world; today, he ranks as one of the most popular Bollywood singers of the past decade.
On his new English-language album Sidharth (7/28), however, he departs from the musical lineage of his family’s home country, and draws on the R&B, indie rock, and American pop styles he grew up with as an immigrant kid in Fremont, CA, in the ’90s and 2000s. Through doing so, he hoped to find a way to communicate “truth” in music through deeper personal exploration. “For maybe the first time, I was able to make music where all these different elements that feel like part of my DNA breathed through the songs,” Sid explains. “I didn’t have to try and think about how to express these things. It started to come out on its own.” Sidharth is a massive-sounding record: soulful, ethereal, and emotionally dense.
