“I designed a music school for my final-year thesis and got grilled at every review,” laughs singer-songwriter Shakthisree Gopalan. Her professors from architecture school probably didn’t expect her to be designing one a year later. She definitely didn’t expect to run into A.R. Rahman and be offered the chance to sing when she’d gone to visit the school she designed, Rahman’s KM College of Music and Technology, on official work.
“After the hundred times I’d dropped off demo CDs in his studio, it was fate that I had to give him one out of my own hands,” says Shakthisree, whose rendition of ‘Nenjukkulle’ for Mani Ratnam’s Kadal went viral. A freelance architect, Shakthisree continues designing because her love for architecture has persisted even though her passion for music has taken her down a different road.
“If you put a gun to my head and made me pick one or the other, I’d probably choose music,” she admits. Since no one is putting a gun to her head, she is still balancing both. It’s more of an imbalance, she confesses, because at any given point of time, she is forced to give one more priority than the other. “I decided to freelance because I want to set my own pace and find my own balance. Just the other day, I turned down an architecture project because I want to spend more time with my own music,” says Shakthisree.
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“I think I’ve earned my street credit in the independent music scene, but I still have a long way to go,” she adds.
After performing two independent shows in Bangalore in January and March, she spent the month of May touring the U.S. singing Bollywood music as a featured artiste for singer Karthik Kumar’s shows. Back in town, she is readying to take the stage in Chennai to perform her original music at an Indiearth concert.
“I also love doing non-movie music shows. They give me a chance to sing my own songs,” she says happily, while talking about the gig.
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Song-writing is a need for this 25-year-old, who writes whenever she feels must. “It’s cathartic for me. When I write a song, I feel like it’s out of me and has a life of its own.”
Singing for movies is a whole different ball game, she says, because the scenario is already set, the lyrics already written. She explains that when she was to sing ‘Yenga Pona Raasa’ for the movie Maryan, director Bharatbala said it should feel like “walking barefoot on the sand”, to convey the spirit of the song. While singing playback, she’s part of a much bigger picture and an instrument in bringing the song to life.
“With independent music, there’s more self-expression involved. I hear my songs in a certain way within my own head,” says Shakthisree, who is still looking forward to working with interesting names from the movie music scene.
While she’s open to offers from different languages, she doesn’t plan to leave Chennai and refers to it as home ground. “The independent music scene needs to get better here and we need to have more performances,” she says.