Divya Lewis: To Music Born

She’s not yet all of 18, but Divya Lewis has been making all the right sounds. Quite literally.

She was one of the youngest musicians on MTV Coke Studio, and being Leslie Lewis’s daughter was not one of her credentials. Quite the contrary, in fact. “When the heads at Coke Studio approached him (Leslie was the music producer), he was unwilling to include me, eventually letting on that I was his daughter,” she reveals. From a nervous 15-year-old, unsure in a sea of very talented, renowned musicians on the popular show, to working on her own EP (extended playlist) and playing with multiple bands on the circuit, three years down the line, Divya sure is making our hearts sing.

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That she had to get into music wasn’t even an option for Divya. “I never went through the thought process where you decide what you want to do in life,” she says. “It just had to be music, I’m no good for anything else anyway! And once I went to music school, it became even harder to be interested in anything else.” In spite of his reluctance to have her on Coke Studio, her father’s been right there, with her, on her musical journey. He’s had her backing vocals for Colonial Cousins and they talk shop quite a lot. “It’s an odd scenario, sometimes,” she says. “You’re doing something with your music where you want your dad to just be a dad about it, but of course, when you have a musician dad, it doesn’t quite work that way. He has to put in his two bits! But it’s all good fun... We’re always bouncing ideas off each other—we may not take the input, but we always respect and value the opinions.”

The girl who aspires to some day reach a ‘Michael Jackson-kinda level’ is in awe of the idea of touching millions without so much as having stood in front of them. “My friends think it’s retarded, but to me, the connection I have with artists I love is so strong and I’ve never met any of them, but they’ve helped me through so much, with their words and music,” she says. And to that end, she’s working on a demo, an EP with covers as well as some original tracks and is performing at the Storm Festival in Bangalore, this month, for an EDM album launch. She’s interning at a studio, The Cotton Press, run by the band Bay City Lights, formerly Something Relevant, and engineer and musician Rohan Rammana. She’s part of an acoustic project, called the Divya+Lala Project for now, with Apurv Isaac, guitarist of popular band The Family Cheese. She’s also playing with Live Cycle, a big band that plays old school funk, jazz and hip hop, with a horn section, keyboards, two bass players, drums and percussion.

And Bollywood? “It would be fantastic if I could get that ball rolling,” she says. “I have a feeling I may not be cut out for it, but I hope and believe I have something I can bring to the table. I would like to get out there a little more, be seen a little more on the circuit, have more people know I’m around and hopefully have them check out my original material, and see the response.”

To hear the sounds Divya’s busy creating, check out her sound cloud page: https:// soundcloud.com/div-lewis.

From the February 2014 issue of L’Officiel India.