From Canada to Chennai

With her latest cover ‘Chandralekha’, Natalie Di Luccio looks forward to singing more Tamil songs.

Natalie Di Luccio.

“I wanted to become a singer, even as a child,” announces Natalie Di Luccio.

She was in Canada then. But, now she’s in India, singing in films and shows. Just like how she wanted it to be.

To Tamil filmgoers, she’s popular as the singer who crooned the fast ‘Aila Aila’ from

I . “That song was more like an experiment. We tried different tones and the makers and Rahman liked it,” she says.

Trained in Western vocals, Natalie came to India in 2008 for a musical collaboration. “I worked on a spiritual album and fell in love with the country and its music,” says Natalie, who has sung in Marathi (‘Navrai Majhi’ in

English Vinglish ) and Gujarati too.

After being here for a while, she headed back to Canada. But her link with Indian music wasn’t going to end.

She started doing covers of popular Hindi tracks and posting them on YouTube. “The videos started picking up soon,” she says, as audiences liked her candid presentation of the songs.

Her most recent cover is that of a Tamil song – the hit ‘Chandralekha’ from the 1993 flick Thiruda Thiruda . “A friend introduced me to this wonderful number and I immediately fell in love with it,” she says, “I’ve seen people performing it in shows and fancied trying a hand at it too.”

One day, as members of her band were jamming together, they tried it out. “I hope my pronunciation was okay,” she laughs, “After Aila Aila , I feel braver about attempting Tamil songs.”

How does she react to her numbers being used in dream sequences in films? “I’ve grown up watching Broadway-type musicals and I love them. And, since I’ve been in the country for a while, I feel I’m half Indian,” she signs off.