Carnatic Artists Sushma Soma and Aditya Prakash Offer Their Idea of ‘Home’ on New Album

On the occasion of Earth Day on April 22nd, Singapore-based, Chennai-bred Carnatic vocalist Sushma Soma spoke about how she was ignoring the environment and glossing over ways to adopt a sustainable lifestyle.

Soma – who released her second album Home with producer-composer Aditya Prakash on April 8th –  says in a statement, “I struggled to reconcile my love for the natural world with the apathy, complacency and convenience in my everyday choices. From using plastic bottles and plastic bags, to taking multiple long showers, to running the air conditioner all day long, I had continued to choose convenience over having to make a harder environmentally-friendly choice.”

The damage caused by human consumption habits are plain for everyone to see, but Soma hopes that with this enchanting, pastoral album as well as her changed “environmentally-friendly choices,” things can still be made sustainable for the environment. On her seven-track album, the two-part song “Man” is particularly playful but also underlines the impact of our actions. “[It] is a take on our everyday choices in all our homes which impact the Earth and an appeal to rethink those very choices,” Soma says.

The follow-up to her 2020 album Sa, Soma and Prakash call on handpan artist Manu Delago for a soothing ingress into Home, while mridangam artist Praveen Sparsh is a fixture across tracks, providing percussive genius when the Carnatic and fusion side of things were called upon. 

Soma sings from the perspective of Mother Nature on “Ma.” She says in the statement, “It explores the emotional journey that I travel through before reaching the state of anger and attempts to push the physical endurance of my voice to explore that journey.” Sorrow abounds poignantly on “The Elephant’s Funeral,” a song informed by the true incident of a pregnant elephant’s death after consuming an explosive placed in a pineapple in Kerala. The ominous Tamil track features V. Prakash Ilaiyaraja’s nadaswaram and percussion by N. Deepan, N. Rajan and M. Vijay, while the lyrics are from composer Neelakanta Sivan’s Carnatic song “Endraiki Siva Krupai.”

The singer’s mourning turns to anger on “Ivory Game,” which is also informed by animal exploitation and takes its name from a documentary called The Ivory Game. In true Indian classical tradition, however, Soma closes Home with a meditative yet devastating song called “Grief,” in which she battles feelings of shame over stirring string arrangements.

Beyond the thematic intensity, Soma says creating an album like Home with Prakash also helped change her thoughts about classical music and its audience. Her statement adds, “This is the first time I engaged with my form, without letting my preconceived biases about the form influence my musical choices in the album; my notions that this genre is too niche, that it’s ancient or about divinity, and that it appeals to only a specific audience. This is the first time I let go of those notions and allowed myself to find conviction in the Carnatic form to emote the urgency with which I wanted to address this cause.” 

Stream ‘Home’ below. Listen on more platforms here.