Meher Sahni

Delhi, India · b. 2001 · FARA Records

Meher Sahni (b. 20 January 2001) is from Delhi — a large, loud, modern city, and a family that treated a good voice as a serious asset and a career in music as a serious mistake. She sang at every wedding in the extended family from the age of nine and was told, warmly and repeatedly, that it was a lovely hobby. She trained anyway: quietly and properly, for years, in the classical foundation Hindi film singing has always rested on — the thing that lets you ornament a line without it sounding like decoration. She didn't tell anyone she was doing it until she was already good.

What she found wasn't music, which was always there, but the specific thing she wanted to do with it: the realisation that the enormous, string-drenched filmi chorus is not a sad form. It's a form that takes a private ache and makes it vast, and in doing so makes it survivable. She wanted to sing the thing a person sings in a car at night, alone, at a volume that isn't really about the song. Her voice is a bright, elegant, agile soprano with real height in it and, more importantly, real control — she ornaments selectively rather than decorating.

Poised, warm and not remotely nervous. She sings in a tradition where the singer stands still, sings, and lets the song do the moving, and she has no interest in doing more than that. She doesn't chat much between songs and doesn't need to. Composed, precise, quietly certain.