Vidya Vox’s ‘Sundari’ Brings Personal Stories and Celebratory Bops

In December 2019, pop artist Vidya Vox aka Vidya Iyer went to a friend’s sangeet ceremony and says it was a sight to behold. Vidya says over a video call, “I was looking around at all the women there and how everyone was in beautiful outfits. I knew all of them and how they were all strong and leaders in their own communities and also very good at their craft and their jobs and also moms – they all play these multifaceted roles in their lives and they all looked fabulous.”

They were there and dancing away, a celebratory essence that Vidya felt fit to distill into a song and that’s how “Champagne Roses” came about. Produced by Shankar Tucker, the hip-hop leaning song references everything from “Kala Chashma” to the Bollywood movie Rangeela, driven by a thumping beat. It also served as the first thread that led to Vidya creating her latest EP Sundari, which released last week with a music video for the title track.

There’s a thematic continuity in terms of where Sundari fits into the “Kuthu Fire” artist’s discography – empowered by inspirational woman and aiming to inspire other women through club-friendly songs that borrow from Vidya’s Carnatic music roots as well as her love for pop, hip-hop, Bollywood and Indian folk music. But Vidya made Sundari EP specifically as an ode to her mother, who took Vidya and her sister out of an abusive marriage and household to raise them, perhaps passing on lessons of self-love and resilience. That forms the crux of the six-track EP, which starts with the impassioned “Stardust” that’s arguably the artist’s most pensive song yet, followed by a switch back into familiar settings with songs like “Sundari,” the Malayalam bop “Ini Ninte Lokam (Go Off)” and “Dangerous” with singer-composer Nikhita Gandhi. Sundari EP closes with another collaboration, bringing in vocalist Rohith Jayaraman for the rap-laced “Yazhiha.”

In an interview with Rollin Stone India, Vidya talks about the making of Sundari EP, what her mom thinks about the songs and her changing relationship with music videos at a time when social media algorithms have completely transformed consumption. Excerpts:

Rolling Stone India: You’ve said this is a deeply personal record. Were there some things you wanted to hold closer until you found the right time or expression for it to release?

Vidya Vox: 100 percent. I haven’t been as open about my childhood in the past, and I felt like all [of my] music, while it feels personal, it [also] felt a little bit surface level, if I’m being completely honest.

I was not fully digging in deep because I was scared to be a little vulnerable with my music. I was scared to be talking about some of the painful past and using that in the studio to make music with it. I feel like I was avoiding it a little bit. I’m kind of in my healing journey now, and I’m in therapy, and just being in touch with and reconciling with some of my past, I think, has brought out a different side of me, and I’ve been ready to be vulnerable with this music.

That’s why it’s also taken so long – because I wanted to make sure the instrumentation, the production, the atmosphere of all the songs really reflected some of the lyrics. I worked with [lyricist] Madhan Karky on it because I also wanted it to be in Tamil, which is my mother tongue. In a way, that’s also very personal.

I had an abusive father growing up and we had to run away from home and just seeing my mom take control of the situation and be brave about it and love herself enough to leave a violent situation where it ultimately helped my sister and I also escape the violent situation was something that I haven’t really thought about much. My brain has blocked it. My brain’s like, ‘I can’t talk about it. I can’t think about it.’

The EP opens with “Stardust” which feels like an unconventional choice for a first track, considering people often want a banger to draw listeners into the rest. Was it intentional to have this esoteric kind of song open the EP?

It’s totally intentional. I wanted a song to open with just a cinematic-ish [song], with strings that build throughout the EP, and about a piece that talked about self-love. Madhan Karky had written some of these lyrics, which I read and I was like, ‘Oh, this is the song I was looking for.’

I composed the whole tune, and Shankar [Tucker] wrote the string arrangements for it. We recorded live string players here, and seeing it all come together, it felt like the right choice [to become the EP’s opening track]. Some of the other songs are saucy, you know? The whole point was that there’s different facets of women as women. We’re all these different things, and how do you capture what a woman is?

My attempt was to show, ‘Here is this person who loves herself and who’s only reliant on herself, who’s independent, but also it spreads to other people.’ Then there’s ‘Dangerous,’ it’s a little saucy. ‘Yazhiha’ is about an angel who’s helping everybody, but also, if you try to play with her, she’ll get you.

There’s a lot of stuff happening sonically on ‘Sundari’ and ‘Ini Ninte Lokam (Go Off).’ How did those two songs come about?

‘Sundari’ is based in a little bit of an afro beat vibe. The image that I had was a bunch of aunties at weddings in their saris, drinks in their hand and they’re partying. They’re confident in themselves and it’s a little bit sexy.

I feel like [in] so much of society, women are just completely sexualized, and we’re only taken at face value. I wanted to reiterate, yes, while we’re sexy and beautiful, underneath it all, we are strong and empowered and can take anybody on. I wanted it to be something that people can dance to but at the same time, I didn’t want to forget the essence of the EP and the essence of where it came from.

My mom loves dance parties. When we would have had a really hard day or we’d had to do a lot of things in court for the first few years and we were fighting a lot of things, my mom would come home and just put on some music and have a dance party with us, and I wanted to capture all of that. It’s like she had this hard, crazy hard day fighting this predator and then comes home and is able to have this dance party. I thought that was so beautiful.

‘Ini Ninte Lokam’ is Malayalam. My family’s from Palakkad. I grew up hearing Malayalam. I don’t personally speak it, but I understand it and I can make my way around Kerala if I needed to. The song was about saying it’s your world and there’s no boundaries and no limits to what you can do and accomplish. It has similar themes of the empowering resilience and it all stems from my mom.

What did your mom think of the EP? Have you made her listen to it?

[Laughs]She’s heard it in every iteration. I’ve had a few different iterations that I’ve played for her, and the final iteration, she’s literally listened to it on loop. She’s like, ‘‘Sundari’ is one of my favorites.’ ‘Stardust’ and ‘Champagne Roses,’ she says she’s just been looping those over and over, and I think it’s because it personally connects with her. She loves it.

She’s a little shy that it was inspired by her. I think it made her a little bit emotional when I told her, ‘cause I wanted to tell her at the end, I didn’t actually tell her when I was making the record. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna tell her at the end.’ And it made her pretty emotional. It was a really sweet moment, and she’s been my supporter since day one, so it was really sweet. She loves it, and she’s always dancing. [laughs] If I call her, she’ll be like, [imitates dancing to ‘Sundari’].

You had the music video for ‘Sundari’ come out. Do you have a video for every song on this EP?

The video for ‘Dangerous’ has been shot, the one I did with Nikhita Gandhi. So we shot that a couple of years ago now. We’re just in the grading process of that – it’s just both of us having fun and looking cool. We shot it at a set here in L.A., and then ‘Champagne Roses,’ we shot it in India, in Jaipur. The inspiration behind that was just to have a bunch of ladies having a good time. We shot it in a palace and it looks cool. Then ‘Stardust’ is very, very cinematic. It’s just me outside, running around. It’s all also done on, like, a very shoestring budget because we’re independent musicians and we’re really funding this all of ourselves, so we have to do a lot with a little.

‘Ini Ninte Lokam’ is gonna be a studio-style video because I wanted the string players to be in it as well since they played on it. The videos are a little bit fun, and I would love for my mom to be in some of the videos, but she lives across the country, so that’s a little bit hard to do. But that’s basically the plan.

You’ve always paid importance to videos as a YouTuber. There have been so many grouses about changing algorithms on YouTube and Instagram. What has it been like to constantly engage with it?

Yeah, I’m tired thinking about it. You have to constantly reinvent your strategy, your content, yourself. The root for all of my video-making is to direct people back to my music. I think at the base of it all, I am an artist, I want people to listen to my music.

So in some ways, I have to play the game of what is going to engage people the most in my profile to then go listen to my music. That was also the reason I started with mashup covers, because I was like, ‘Okay, I need to start building a little bit of a base of some following. So then when I release my original music, there are people that will listen to [it].’

It has changed a lot since the pandemic. I think people’s attention span is much shorter. You need to get people in the first three seconds of a video. That sometimes drives me crazy. So I try to play into that sometimes, but other times I’m just like, you know what? You can’t. People who are gonna find you will find you. I get down by it a little bit, honestly, because the people who are actually following me never see my posts. It’s always gonna be new people. It’s always gonna be people that the algorithm is trying to reach.

I had to also keep that in mind going into some of these shoots because I’m like, ‘I’ve shot this full music video, but wait, I have to shoot a 10-second snippet or something that’s gonna grab people’s attention.’ It’s hard. I don’t have all the answers.

Are there any potential shows or tours planned to promote Sundari in India?

Yeah, I’m hoping that we’ll do some shows in the Fall to promote the EP. Hopefully we can do an India trip and do little release parties and sessions.