Meet Aditi Iyer, a 17-year-old Mumbaikar who has just released her second EP with dark-pop tunes
Iyer at the studio in Los Angeles where she recorded Dollhouse
Some children want to be astronauts when they grow up. Others dream of becoming doctors or actors. But ever since she can remember, Aditi Iyer had only one ambition for when she became an adult — to be a musician. “My mother tells me that I have been humming songs that I have heard since I was only nine months old, and started singing popular nursery rhymes when I was three. Then, when I was about four or five, I graduated to songs like Power of love by Celine Dion, and tracks by Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson,” says the 17-year-old Mumbaikar who released her first track when she was merely 10 years old, adding, “My entire goal is to dedicate my life to music. I have really lofty ambitions and dream of being the first Indian musician to make it really big in the West. I am really trying hard to make that dream into a reality.”
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Dollhouse, her recently released second EP, is one step towards achieving that end. It’s a four-track project with a dark-pop sound, where she sings about experiences that she might not have personally gone through, but which she’s seen others around her deal with. Iyer tells us, “I would like to call myself the sort of songwriter who likes to write about things that are foreign to her. I want to live other people’s lives vicariously. I haven’t ever been in an abusive relationship [one of the themes in the EP]. But I have a friend who is in one, and this EP is an ode to her and people like her. I wanted to get in touch with what they feel.”
Sonically speaking, the singer, who is trained in opera by a private teacher, fell back on her music education to give the tracks a certain emotive quality. Opera, she says, has taught her how to sing powerfully without hurting her voice. “It’s taught me how to sound soft and yet powerful and emotive at the same time. In terms of Dollhouse, the music relies heavily on emotions, and there are times when I wanted to sound loud in terms of my voice without it being overbearing.”
The Mumbai-based high school student adds that balancing her studies and music can be a bit of a task at times. She follows an international curriculum that is extremely demanding, but she writes tunes and sings whenever she finds the time to stay in touch with her music. These tunes are not necessarily meant to see the light of day in an album or EP. “I sometimes write music as a pastime and don’t plan to show anyone these songs,” she says, adding, however, that she is currently already working on her third EP which she plans to release in a couple of months. That’s a pretty fast turn-around period for a musician who is still in her teens, but then again, Iyer has decided to dedicate her life to the craft and she’s already going full steam ahead to realise her dream.
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