From ‘Old Friend’ to SoundGarden: Shakthisree Gopalan on music, mental health and creativity

It was during the lockdown in 2020 that Shakthisree Gopalan put pen to paper for a song. On a particularly uneventful day – the kind that makes you question where life is headed and revisit certain incidents – the singer-songwriter penned this line, “Why should I pay a price to be myself when the world is going mad?”

Those words would finally find a home in ‘Old Friend’, an intimate track that may well be her most vulnerable work yet. “It’s about my inner demons. It holds everything – from my neurodivergence, my mental health, and above all, choosing myself,” she writes in a note about the track.

First featured at a Friday student concert during her days at Berklee NYC, ‘Old Friend’ is a deeply lived song.

“It is,” she admits, in a conversation with The Hindu, “Every time I have performed this song, some part of me healed.”

‘Old Friend’ has been many years in the making, a factor that makes Shakthisree draw parallels to American singer-songwriter Don Henley’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’. “He famously said that it took him 40 years to write that song, and four minutes to sing it. I feel I finally understood what he meant. I had a phase when I used to feel broken, without holding myself with grace and kindness. There was a turning point when I gave it a name – that it was an ‘Old Friend’. It made it easy for me to navigate through life.”

The song’s note talks about her choosing love over fear. Elaborating, she says. “I would operate out of fear. Every time I go on stage, I would tell myself not to make mistakes... and every time, I would end up remembering only that. Over time, I trained myself to focus on the good stuff, however small they may be.”

Recorded and filmed live in Brooklyn, NYC, ‘Old Friend’, which dropped on music platforms recently, drops at a significant time – one during which independent music is having its moment. Closer home, tracks such as Kaber Vasuki’s recent independent ‘Frangipani’ is also opening doors to conversations on mental health. Did she feel any hesitation in sharing her journey to the world, or did she deem it necessary? “When I first sang it, I felt naked and bare,” she recalls, “But the more I let it out, I felt a part of me healed. People would walk up to me and share that they saw themselves in it too. My songs have always been my way of pouring my emotions out. While my film singing career gave me a chance to step into the shoes of many beautiful characters, independent music gives me the freedom to channelise my voice. It’s like I’m opening my diary and saying: today, I feel happy, or today I feel sad. It is essential for more artistes to be honest and share their voice.”

New openings

When Shakthisree Gopalan burst into the film music scene as a singer with ‘Nenjukule’ in Kadal (2013), she had two dreams: to go to music college, and to become a music director. Cut to 2026, and both those have been ticked off: she subsequently went to Berklee NYC and also turned composer with the Madhavan-Nayanthara-starring 2025 film, Test. “The greatest learning from Test was figuring out a creative process. It was exciting working with Sashikanth, who, like me, also has an architecture background,” she points out.

Not many people are aware that Shakthisree is also an architect and has designed AR Rahman’s music school (KM Music Conservatory) and re-designed a portion of Panchathan, the composer’s recording suite. “Emotionally, it meant a lot that I could add some value. This intersection of space and sound is the playground that I love puzzling in. Designing KM Music Conservatory was a dream project for me – because my thesis project at architecture school was ‘designing music schools’.”

Her other dream project – which is drumming up some noise even now – has been SoundGarden, a multisensory, interactive installation that invites people to play with sound, light and space. Last showcased at Sabha BLR in Bengaluru in 2024, she is mulling on an online version currently, besides building a ear-training web application that hopes to help children who are starting out to learn music. “I’m an explorer at heart. I’ve also been vibe coding with Claude and presenting the SoundGarden concept in hackathons. It’s in the middle of everything I love – an exploration of space and sound – and I wish it goes places.”

‘Old Friend’ is streaming on YouTube and other music platforms.