BENGALURU: It was a bit of a pleasant surprise for fans of indie singer Sangeetha Rajeev when she dropped her Punjabi pop song Rise, which is already a chart-topper. However, the singer feels she has been manifesting it for a while. “I’ve always been listening to Punjabi songs. So that’s always been a big influence. I wanted to unite both the South and North. A South Indian singer singing in Punjabi is something that not many people would have tried. So I wanted to do that,” says Rajeev, mentioning that she will be releasing more songs from the album soon.
Breaking all the general assumptions, Rajeev mentions she didn’t find the pronunciation difficult. “I was brought up in Mumbai. So, Hindi and Marathi were languages that I learned in school. I had friends there who belonged to North India. I took some help from another friend, who is Punjabi, to understand if my pronunciation was right or not,” says Rajeev.
A Punjabi music lover, Rajeev as an artiste and listener, has been looking forward to creating something in Punjabi. “I’ve been listening to Punjabi music since my childhood and its music industry is one of the thriving industries in the country. I am a die-hard fan of Daler Mehndi, even though I have sung so many of his songs in my concerts. I have loved artistes like Diljit Dosanjh and Sidhu Moose Wala,” says Rajeev.
Rajeev’s songs have a visible tilt towards folk and she does not want to limit herself to just South Indian music. And she is quite glad that her fans are loving her experiments with music. “I didn’t expect that I would get this kind of reaction. I have always been singing Kannada songs and my listeners are used to my doing that. Now, when I sing a Punjabi song, since there are a lot of Punjabi listeners here also in Bengaluru, I have been getting positive responses,” says Rajeev, who is soon going to make her Sandalwood debut in a suspense thriller, titled Nimitta Matra.