Kenny Garrett

For Sid Sriram, there is a quality inherent in the Carnatic music of South India that he describes as “universal truth.” The 32-year-old singer/songwriter has spent years imparting this truth to audiences in India and across the world; today, he ranks as one of the most popular Bollywood singers of the past decade.

On his new English-language album Sidharth, however, he departs from the musical lineage of his family’s home country, where he has lived since 2015, and draws on the R&B, indie rock, and American pop styles he grew up with as an immigrant kid in Fremont, CA, in the ’90s and 2000s. Through doing so, he hoped to find a way to communicate “truth” in music through deeper personal exploration.