The Parenting Panel with Sandhya

Sandy Asirvatham—known artistically as Sandhya—is an award-winning writer, musician, and music & video producer living in Baltimore, although forever a New Yorker at heart. Despite evident talent in her youth, she did not begin a professional performance career until her mid-30s, when she started gigging as a jazz pianist, singer, and bandleader. By her early 40s, she’d expanded to the roles of composer, lyricist, and record/concert producer. Her first collection of original songs is called MEMOIR (2007)—mini-fictions set to eclectic jazz-pop grooves. Later she was the executive producer and chief composer of MOBTOWN MOON, a genre-defying, fully reimagined homage to Pink Floyd’s THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. In 2018 she began working closely with vocal coach and producer Pete Strobl. Together with Sandhya’s new band, they completed the instrumental tracks for INNOCENT MONSTER, 10 new original songs with vivid, narrative lyrics and fantastic rock-funk-jazz grooves. Global pandemic almost shut them down, but Sandhya taught herself how to record her own pro-level vocal tracks at home, then practiced and did take after take after take to get things right—resulting in an even better final product than expected.

You can buy her a physical copy of Innocent Monster here.

How many children do you have? And what are their names and ages? 

I have one son whom we adopted as a young infant (4 weeks old), and is now 18 and heading to college in another city & state.

Did you have fears or concerns about how becoming a parent would interfere with your artistic endeavors?

I absolutely did, so much so that I assumed I’d never want children, or marriage for that matter. As a tail-end, second-wave feminist with a mother who worked as a surgeon all her life, I also resented how often women in particular still give up their ambitions in order to become mothers, or end up having two exhausting full-time jobs they can never excel at. And honestly, I never really had a profound urge. I finally did get married, and in the first few years we used to joke that my husband’s biological clock was ticking but not mine. Yet at some point, it seemed a necessary step in our lives together, and I don’t regret taking it.

But I have a vivid memory of standing in the middle of my kitchen one day while the baby was napping, and thinking, “Well, my life is basically over, but it’s okay because I love him so much.”

Have those fears come true, or no?

To be perfectly honest, yes and no. I was always an ambitious person and had accomplished a few things by the time I became an adoptive mother at age 37, and I was lucky to have a partner with a steady paycheck that enabled me to take on some major projects and continue building a strong local reputation as a writer, musician, video producer, and all-around project impresario. But having come from an unhappy and unsupportive family of origin, I struggled both emotionally and practically while raising the kid. When typical conflicts and challenges came up, it was hard not to feel resentful--not at the child, but at myself for my own life choices--because of the time and energy sacrifices I’d made. Would it be worth it? I often wondered.

All these years later, he’s a great young person, super smart and funny, but also kind and responsible and beloved by his friends, teachers, coworkers, and bosses. I feel my spouse and I did a much better job than our parents would have. So I’ve come out of the experience with a significant amount of self-healing and personal confidence. Raising a human is a big deal! 

That said, it’s hard to watch child-free friends reach the glory-days of their careers while I feel like I’m playing a game of catch-up.

In what ways has parenthood helped your creativity, if any?

There’s been one huge, significant thing. I was a creative writer, journalist, and jazz pianist/singer when our son came into our lives. As a late-blooming working musician, I’d written a song or two but I was mostly doing jazz standards and my own arrangements of rock/pop covers. Then...suddenly...shortly after declaring my creative life “over” in the kitchen that day...I started having song lyrics occur to me, one after the other. They were all really solid, memorable, and idiosyncratic, and they became the basis of my first jazz-pop CD called MEMOIR (2007) as well as some of the tracks finally studio-recorded on my new CD, INNOCENT MONSTER (2021). But I’m certain I suddenly became a prolific songwriter because of one special aspect of parenthood: Nursery rhymes! Nursery rhymes and Doctor Seuss. Reading all that sing-songy stuff to the baby on a daily basis seems to have shaken loose my capacity for rhyming couplets and song form. My creative writing experience and my musical sensibilities merged, all at once, in the space of a few weeks or months.

Here’s an exceptional story from those years. I was deep into the music of the late singer songwriter from Britain named Nick Drake. Drake was a fragile soul with profound stage fright and a tendency toward depression. He died young from an overdose, although it’s not clear how intentional it was. I often played his Pink Moon CD for the baby, because Drake’s guitar and piano and voice sound gentle, even though the lyrics are rather dark and mysterious. I eventually wrote my own song called “Ode To Nick Drake,” which is a similarly ballad-like, gentle-seeming exploration into the mind of a lonely depressive--a biography backed up by some of my own personal experiences with the dark side. (It’s a standout track on the new CD, INNOCENT MONSTER, by the way.) The chorus goes like this:
I am I, along the periphery
I am I, among the menagerie
I am I, speck of salt in the endless sea,
I am I, alone in my skin.

Well, a few months after I’d written this song and had begun to perform it live at gigs, I was putting Miles to bed and he chose Dr. Seuss’s HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU as his bedtime reading. It’s not my favorite. In fact, I find it a really boring book, but you know how it goes--with these books you read hundreds of times to your kids, you learn to read with your eyes and mouth while your brain goes into lala land. But I turned the page at some point and saw the words: “I AM I!” repeated over and over again. In fact, it was Seuss’s birthday exhortation to celebrate and love oneself.

And I had copped it for a song about...deep loneliness and suicidal depression.

Forgive my sick sense of humor but all I could do was laugh and laugh while the kid demanded to know what was so funny.

What has parenthood taught you about yourself, your music, or your creative process?

That even when I’m in the midst of making my own art, and as self-absorbed as I need to be...I’m still not the actual center of the universe, lol.

How do you juggle your family and your career? Who’s your support system?

I had a reasonably good support system in my husband for a long time, but he was never 100% happy about my career choices, and for that and many other reasons our relationship began to deteriorate. I’m on my own now, by choice, in an attempt to make creative work the center of my life. So I am my own financial and emotional support system for now, but it’s okay: I have dear friends, loyal fans, and one special person in my life who’s got his own children and artistic priorities, but who is still a nice sounding board and mutual cheerleader as we each muddle through our individual struggles.

Have you ever written a song for or about your kids? If so please share a description and a link. 

No, not my style. It would be fun to try, but I’d have to make a deliberate project of it and see if it goes anywhere. It’s not where my heart or mind live. My lyrics are feisty, vivid, sometimes dark or philosophical little short stories, best understood by adults with some life mileage on them. That said--I’ve had quite a few very young fans, mostly kids who know me personally or grew up with my son. I think they’re mostly just fascinated to know me in person and then hear my recordings or see my shows. Their wide eyes are wonderful to see!

Find Sanhya via:

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Spotify | Twitter | iTunes/Apple Music | YouTube | Soundcloud