HYDERABAD: Music came quite naturally to Abhilasha Sinha, the Delhi-based pop singer, and songwriter, who recently released three new singles, Hold Your Pride, Mother and Tum Ho Kahaan. She claims The Internet and Lianne La Havas, as her influences on one hand, while cherishes old classics by Lata Mangeshkar and AR Rahman too. The 25-year-old singer is pursuing music business at NYU and will be performing in Hyderabad and Bengaluru next, as part of The Labours of Love Tour this week.
“The first-ever song that I sang, was a bhajan; when I was two or three or years-old. Both my parents had a strong affinity for music and old school Bollywood became my first introduction to music. But it wasn’t until the age of 11 or 12 that I heard my first English song,” reveals Abhilasha, who sings both in English and Hindi. “I started taking an active interest in western music later when I became a part of the choir-(Western Music Society) at Lady Shri Ram College,” she adds.
Abhilasha has been a part of a folk ensemble, called River and an electronic group with mixed styles called No Honey. “River was born out of a collaboration between two of my friends, Kamakshi Khanna and Tarana Marwah, at the end of college and No Honey happened, a little later, after meeting Keshav Dhar, a music producer based in Delhi.
While the all-girl band was heavily inspired by The Staves, Zero 7, London Grammar and Fleetwood Mac, both Keshav and I wanted to try out something different from our respective musicalities and stepped into a more electronic soundscape space.
We were later joined by Suyash Gabriel on drums,” she shares. While Hold Your Pride calls out to people for letting go of their self-centeredness in a relationship; Tum Ho Yahaan is very much a love ditty with a fresh sound and a melodious refrain, which seems to grow on you over time. Mother, on the other hand, stands out, both for the deep and thoughtful lyrics, and the musical incline, which starts on a soft note, but turns into a heavy instrumental number by the end.