He has a recording commitment and a flight to catch later in the day with the rest of Harris Jeyaraj’s concert team. There’s a Harris on the Edge concert in Dubai he’s performing at. And just the previous night, he had a recording that went on till almost midnight.
But at 7.30 in the morning, he shows up fresh for our photo shoot at the Marina, willing to give it his all. Even if it means riding a motorcycle with brakes that are suspect. Or striking concert poses by the beach. He’s a natural.
“I think a musician should have character,” singer Haricharan Seshadri says later over breakfast as we grab Mini Tiffin at Saravana Bhavan. Over the last year, he’s had a song in every other big mainstream release. “Ko”, “Deivathirumagal”, “Avan Ivan”, “Velayudham”, “Rajapattai” and “Vettai”. more recently.
Haricharan has this well-groomed modern stylish thin beard to go with his personality, something his family of Carnatic musicians does not fully understand. “They wonder why I need to do all this. But performing has become an important part of our music today,” he says.
And this 25-year-old MBA from Loyola College is polishing his marketing skills to promote his music, having spent the last year and half grooming his band ‘Haricharan Live’ and finding his voice.
Haricharan is no newcomer to music. He first performed in front of the late legendary M.S. Subbulakshmi when he was 10 ten years old. “I’ve been learning classical music for 17 years now. I learnt from K.V. Narayanaswamy, T.M. Prabhavati and now I learn from under Padma Bhushan P.S. Narayanaswamy,” he says.
Starting out young
“My family has been into classical music. My grandfather Grandpa had an sabha called Aalapana. He was the first one to introduced mic-less concerts. also known as chamber concerts. My father Dad played the mridangam. He couldn’t take up singing, so he made sure I got into it. I was very little when I went to my the first music class.” He won The Music Academy’s classical music competition at the age of 12 and that encouraged him to participate in many more competitions all through his schooling.
“I did my schooling in P.S. Senior, Mylapore. My mother Mom was a librarian. My grandmother has Grandmom a National award in Mathematics. So it was pretty hard for me to not study. I had to balance both my music and academics. studies. I won a few competitions in school And then ‘Kaadhal’ happened when I was 17. I was fresh out of school then.”
Thanks to his participation in TV competitions, he became acquainted with A.V. Ramanan who suggested that he drop by at director Shankar’s office since they were looking for new singers. “That’s how I first met Joshua Shridhar. I sang a couple of classical songs and he liked my voice. We recorded some tunes the tunes in my voice and Shankar listened to it. I recorded three songs for the movie including the ‘Kaadhal’ theme song.”
So was Joshua was his first 4 a.m. friend in the film industry? “Not 4 a.m. He is was a normal person. Not not a nocturnal person,” says Haricharan.
From three songs, he’s gone on to sing over 300 songs over the last eight years in four languages. Concerts and stage shows have taken him to Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, Norway, France, Paris, U.K., France, Germany, Denmark and now Dubai.
“I’ve never recorded a demo. Whatever I sang was acted as a demo for me. After my first song, people started calling me. It’s been a chain reaction. I have to thank my classical singing background for that. It makes you equipped, it makes your vocal chords adapt to other styles.”
He’s recorded for every other music director except A.R. Rahman. “I have been doing backing vocals for him since I was a kid, for 14 years now. I had a chance to sing in ‘Mangal Pandey’. But that’s a long story,” he says with a tinge of disappointment.
It turns out that he had spent the entire night before his Chemistry board exams in Rahman’s studio for recording a song. “I recorded till six in the morning and I had to be in the exam hall at 8.30 a.m. So I told him, ‘Sir, if you don’t mind...’ He smiled and let me go. But I really regret that because after that there was no proper communication with him. I haven’t got to work with him.” since."
However, he cherishes every moment of working with Ilaiyaraja. Haricharan got to record a song with the maestro for “Ponnar Shankar” and more recently for a biopic on the life of Sathya Sai Baba.
“I can say I’ve grown up listening to his songs. So it was a dream to even meet him. After I sang a few songs for Yuvan, I got close to the family. It’s amazing how he writes notes and gives it to the orchestra to play. He’s nowhere near the computer. He asks engineers to edit but he’s not a computer person, he’s theoretical,” he explains.
A month and a half ago, he got a call from Ilaiyaraja’s office to record for a song. “He called me a day before the recording and asked me to repeat a tune. It was for a song for the biopic on Sathya Sai Baba, a song he sings when he’s 14 and he wanted a young person to sing it. He immediately conceived the notes, the interludes and it was so beautiful. He told me to sing it live from start to finish with the orchestra. So if I made a mistake, everyone would have to do it from the beginning. start. The director wanted someone with more experience but Ilaiyaraja sir liked my voice and wanted to do something new.”
“Of late, surprisingly, I have done songs for a lot of Telugu movies including ‘Panja’ and ‘Bodyguard’,” he says. “I don’t know Telugu or Malayalam.”
Though his family hails from Palghat, he’s yet to pick up Malayalam. The Malayalam song he sang, ‘Mozhikalum’ went viral recently. He’s excited at the range of songs he is being offered today.
“Earlier, I used to get typecast. After ‘Kaadhal’, I got a spate of sad songs to sing. And then, after that, it was what they called the bedroom song. Raunchy songs where they would ask me to emote like the actor and make moaning sounds. ‘Sexya paadunga,’ (sing it sexily) they would say. If you want it any more sexy and I would have to wear a bikini and sing, I would tell them,” he laughs.
