Sid Sriram
For Sid Sriram, there’s a quality inherent in Carnatic music — the classical music of South India — that he describes as a “universal truth.” The 32-year-old singer/songwriter has spent years channeling that truth for audiences in India and around the world. Today, he is one of the most celebrated playback singers in Bollywood. But with his new English-language album Sidharth, he steps away from the musical lineage of his family’s homeland — where he’s lived since 2015 — and returns to the R&B, indie rock, and American pop he grew up with as an immigrant kid in Fremont, California, in the ’90s and 2000s. Through this shift, he sought a new way to convey truth in music — one rooted in deep 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 bold, sweeping album — soulful, ethereal, and emotionally rich. Many of its 14 tracks feel vast, echoing like chants from a mountaintop. Yet the album was born in an intimate setting. In the summer of 2021, Sid took a leap of faith and flew to Minneapolis to meet producer Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs, Bon Iver) — someone he’d only interacted with on Instagram. Over one intensive week in the studio, they tracked most of the songs live with a small group of Olson’s collaborators, including Justin Vernon of Bon Iver — a longtime inspiration for Sid.
“There was no ego,” Sid remembers. “Everyone was just really happy to be in a room making music together. I didn’t know any of them at the time, but it quickly felt like a family.”
Leading this collective, Sid poured himself into crafting vocal hooks and improvising elaborate song forms in the moment. “I had to trust in chaos and let it guide me,” he says. What emerged was a genre-blurring mix of pop anthems and progressive experiments, built around Sid’s soul-stirring voice and Olson’s genre-defying production. Dance-ready tracks like the Afrobeat-inflected “Friendly Fire” sit alongside wild sonic detours like “The Hard Way,” a tribute to family and community with a hyperactive drum ’n’ bass groove that evokes Velvet Rope-era Janet Jackson and Kid A-era Radiohead in equal measure.
At first glance, Sidharth might seem far removed from the music that made Sid a household name in India, ever since his breakout hit “Adiye” (from 2013’s Kadal) catapulted him to fame just a year after graduating from music school. Most viral videos of Sid show him performing ragas with traditional backing, not weaving personal stories through Auto-Tuned vocals and glitched-out beats. But before his success in Indian cinema, Sriram was just another American twentysomething obsessed with pop and R&B. He first went viral with a cover of Frank Ocean’s “We All Try” on YouTube. In many ways, Sidharth reconciles these two musical identities — the young Bay Area kid and the Carnatic torchbearer — showing how each continues to inform and inspire the other.
The album’s most moving moments come when Sid merges these influences into something wholly his own. On “Dear Sahana,” a song about “yearning for companionship,” he blends R&B, gospel, Indian classical melisma, and even country flourishes. At the track’s emotional peak, he’s backed by the children’s choir led by his mother — the same one he grew up singing in. It’s a moment that still brings him to tears. While country music wasn’t something he grew up with, Sid found it surprisingly natural. “I realized that pedal steel lends itself to the way my voice moves,” he explains. “The way it bends felt like a cool mirror to the Carnatic-based melodies.”
While many of Sidharth’s songs look forward — musically and emotionally — the album also marks a kind of homecoming. After years immersed in his ancestral traditions, Sid re-embraces his American identity. Even the album title is a nod to self-reclamation. “When we first moved to the Bay, in second grade, I decided to change my name to Sid since so many people messed it up,” he says. “Sidharth, in a way, is me reclaiming the name and everything that comes with it — not just culturally, but personally.”
It’s a fitting name for an album that feels like an excavation — a deep dive into Sid Sriram’s life, memories, and music, in search of something honest, unresolved, and alive.
