Chaos And Disorder

Multi-hyphenate Sid Sriram arrives on the indie stage with his new album Entropy, by way of playback and Carnatic music stardom

Sid Sriram was three years old when he delivered his first Carnatic music recital in Fremont, California. “My mum had started a Carnatic vocals school when we moved there,” soon after he was born in Chennai in 1990. “Coming from a musical family, I’d begun to pick things up by ear quite early.” And so, there he was in 1993, presenting a thiruppavai or two and “feeling right at home. My mind was always at ease on stage. Plus, I remember really enjoying the attention.”

Sriram, now 28, is a seasoned Carnatic singer, a graduate of Berklee College of Music and a bona fide star in the South Indian film music industries. Ever since AR Rahman “introduced” him on the superhit song “Adiye” for Mani Ratnam’s 2013 Kadal, he’s sung film tracks in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam; and trophies have followed. “But I didn’t get too many calls initially – my voice was very ‘new’, they said.”