Jonita Is Still In Her ‘Baddie Era’

India-born, Canada-raised and Mumbai-based pop artist and singer Jonita Gandhi has spent over a decade proving that language is no bar and in fact, her strength.

The Indo-Canadian singer, who’s lent her voice to hits in Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Telugu and beyond, recently added a new dimension with acting, making her debut as a schoolteacher in Aakash Baskaran’s romantic drama Idhayam Murali, alongside Atharvaa Murali and Fahadh Faasil.

On the music side, she’s just dropped “Broken Parts,” a tender, multilingual duet with Grammy-nominated Canadian singer-songwriter JP Saxe — a collaboration two years and one pandemic-viral moment in the making. We caught up with Jonita from Dallas — mid-tour with South Indian hitmaker Anirudh Ravichander and mid-scramble to learn an unreleased Telugu song for that night’s show — to talk about crossing over into acting, the pressure of singing in languages that aren’t her own, and why she’s not done being “unapologetically” herself just yet. Excerpts below:

Rolling Stone India: You’re in Dallas right now, and I hear you were up late learning a brand new song for tonight’s show. What’s that process usually like when it’s a language you don’t speak?

Jonita: Honestly, I feel like it’s luck at this point. Sometimes it feels so easy — it’s words I’ve sung before, I’m familiar with the pacing, so I have time to think and sing. But sometimes it’s so fast, and if you don’t already speak the language, it still feels like gibberish to a certain extent — it’s just sounds, you know what I mean? I just kind of assess it, song to song, and spend time accordingly. Some happen really fast, some take forever. I don’t think I have a really good hack, but the more I do it, it definitely gets easier. What I will say is singing in languages that are foreign is way easier than speaking or doing dialogue, because you have a melody to stick to — it programs your brain to remember how the vowels or words sound, because it’s glued to a melody. Even when someone’s trying to teach me how to say something normally, I’ll subconsciously end up putting a little melody to it. Otherwise, it’s impossible.

You’ve talked about the pressure of performing songs, sometimes not even your own, in front of massive audiences who know every word. What’s that like?

It’s a lot of work, especially on shows like this, where it’s massive audiences, big venues, and there are people there who know the song word for word. So I have to match that energy of knowing it too, even though for me it’s foreign — that’s their language. Everybody in the audience is ready to nitpick — not that they do, touch wood, so far so good — but I just don’t want to let them down. Even at A.R. Rahman concerts, when I have to sing his repertoire from the Nineties and early 2000s — songs that are ingrained in us — I’ll have to sing it in a different language, so I’m like, now I have to relearn or unlearn it the way I know it, and relearn the phonetics, the scanning, as they call it. That pressure is what motivates me to put in the extra time and effort beforehand that nobody sees.

When you get to make a song your own, through a cover, does it feel different?

Sometimes it’s very spontaneous, and it just flows out in a unique way — one of my friends, who’s actually from Dallas, calls it the “Jonita-fied” version, which is really funny. When that happens organically, great. But sometimes when I’m doing covers I remember intentionally thinking, “Okay, how do I make this my own?” On stage, though, I kind of let it happen spontaneously.

Let’s talk about your acting debut in Idhayam Murali. How did that come about?

It’s funny, because I’ve always been interested in acting, but I always felt singing was my forte — I’d had way more training in it. When I was younger, I used to do acting camps, and I always thought maybe I’d do musical theater, but that’s not really a big thing in India the way it is in the West. So I went hard on the singing, and I’m still going hard on it, but now opportunities are coming for acting, and I thought, maybe this is my chance to live out that dream, at least in small ways for now. I’ve done three acting workshops already — expensive ones, ten days, seven days — because I didn’t want to step on screen before I’d put in some work. Even though I’ve been on camera for years as a performer, acting is a very different skill, and I’m still new at it relative to how new I am at singing. If people know me to be of a certain caliber as a singer, I felt that pressure once this opportunity came my way.

Honestly, the director was more convinced than I was that I could do this. He was initially playing with the idea of casting me in a longer role, and I said no. I was nervous; I had shows, and I didn’t want to half-ass it. So that idea kind of fell away because it was too much of a commitment for where I was at. Then he came back with a much shorter part. Earlier in my career, I was mostly asked to audition for roles where singing was involved — playing a musician, or someone from the music world — but this had nothing to do with music. I play Geetha, a schoolteacher in Trichy. It’s a story within a story — most of my part is a flashback to when the hero is a child, and it’s about the first time he falls in love, which is with his teacher. That’s so relatable — it’s never going to materialize when you’re a kid in love with your teacher — and I thought it was such a sweet story, written in a way that really resonated with me.

- YouTube youtu.be

Are more acting offers coming in now? How are you thinking about them?

Right now, honestly, I’m just training. I’d love to do something meaningful — let’s see, it’s tough. It’s a whole other world when it comes to choosing acting projects versus music projects. It feels a little heavier, and it’s more of a time commitment, because when you’re shooting, you’re out for a stretch, and that’s a different calculation than deciding whether to sing a playback song or write a track.

You had “Broken Parts” with JP Saxe come out recently. How did that collaboration happen?

I first discovered him during the pandemic, when his song “If The World Was Ending” [2019] — the one that goes “you come over, you stay the night” — went crazy viral. It was everywhere, and I was obsessed. I used to do this thing called Sunday Singstagrams, little singing clips every week, and I think I did two of them for that one song because I loved it so much and resonated with the lyrics. Then I looked him up and realized what a good songwriter he is, and what a beautiful voice. From then on I kept an ear out subconsciously. His name came up again about two years back — he was performing in the Middle East, and a mutual friend from the music world was with him. I said, “If you’re with JP, tell him I love him.” He sent me this really sweet video message through his phone. We started following each other, and then he was working on his new album and sent me one or two songs, saying, ‘Let me know if I wanted to jump on any of them.’ Both were beautiful, but “Broken Parts” especially.

I resonated with it and felt it would sound so beautiful as a multilingual duet. The melody of the existing version, the way it was arranged, so acoustic — it lent itself so well to some Hindi. The second verse was completely bare, so I composed a new melody for it, brought in Shayra, a lyricist I work with, to help fill in the words, and sent it back. He loved it. The song’s been “done” — the writing, at least — for almost a year now, maybe half a year at minimum. I kept pushing to know when we’d put it out, and we finally found the right moment. I also met up with him in Toronto a couple of months ago to record a live version, which we shot and put out on YouTube as well.

You’re both from Toronto — did that shared background make the collaboration easier?

I feel like you can resonate with fellow Canadians a hundred percent. I don’t know what it is, but Canadians get on really well with other Canadians, especially when we’re both traveling a lot, which we both do. When we first met in person, I realized how easy and fun it was to be around him. It’s like, we can just WhatsApp each other and decide things. But in person, in the studio, there was a new kind of magic, because we’d done everything remotely up to that point — he’d recorded his bits, I’d recorded mine. In person, I realized there was a bridge section I wanted to extend so I could add another part, and he loved the idea — but said I had to sing it with him. So the same day we shot the live version, I taught him four lines of the Hindi bridge and made him sing it. He sounds so good — he has a real knack for languages, he does a lot of cross-collabs with Spanish artists too, so I felt like he’d be a natural, and he was.

I think it comes from growing up in Toronto, in that melting pot of cultures — we’re both used to having friends from everywhere, experiencing food from everywhere. So it’s normal for us to want to incorporate that into the music, because that’s what we grew up around.

We’re seeing a lot more of this — Indian languages crossing over globally, whether it’s Punjabi meeting English, or artists like Ed Sheeran incorporating Indian adaptations of their songs, which you’ve been part of. What’s your take on that wave?

For me, the number one priority in any of these opportunities is authenticity — you should never have to manufacture that. It’s cool that it’s happening, but the best way for it to happen is organically; you shouldn’t force it, because it sounds forced otherwise. There’s actually a song I can’t even remember the name of because it never came out — they wanted me to sing Punjabi on an otherwise English ballad, and I just felt it’s not how I think. I think in English, but I speak more fluent Hindi than Punjabi. If I’m the one co-writing, unless we start completely from scratch on the lyric, it’s not going to feel natural to me specifically — not that it would sound bad, but it wouldn’t be authentic for me. It just needs to feel authentic and not forced, and then you have something magical. On “Broken Parts,” I preferred doing Hindi because it flowed with the melody and I could contribute more, since I speak it. But the possibilities are endless — it all depends on what the song represents for you.

Where are you at right now in terms of saying yes or no to things — whether that’s film song offers or your own music?

I’m in a place right now where I’m trying to do more things led by where I want to go, versus waiting for opportunities to fall in my lap and running with those. I’m trying to be more actively involved in creating opportunities for myself, and I want to focus on the projects that genuinely excite me. I’ve been here over ten years now — how did time fly? I’ve gotten a lot of great experience, and I feel like people can tell the difference — when I’m promoting something I really love versus something I’m just putting up a customary post about. I put out a song called “Beparwai” that’s about being unapologetically yourself as a woman, not having to define yourself by being in love with a man. That’s a topic I really believe in — I’m a Punjabi girl with roots in Delhi, raised in Canada, and everything about that song felt very me. We even shot it with me doing full choreography, which I love — dancing is my favorite thing.

The way I promoted that song, I felt so happy, so unbothered about spamming people with it, because I was proud of it. That feeling was addictive, and I want to be that excited about everything I do — which doesn’t really happen when people just hand you a finished song, and you’re only there to sing it.

- YouTube youtu.be

You played Lollapalooza too — what was that experience like?

That was the most stressful, but also the most rewarding show of my life.

There’s this idea now of artists moving through “eras” — do you feel pressure to constantly reinvent, especially in this attention-deficit age?

Every time you say “era,” I think of Taylor Swift, because of her Eras Tour. But I do think it makes sense. As humans, forget artists, we go through phases. It’s normal to feel something really strongly, like in relationships — you think this is right for you, and if you break up two years later, people ask what’s wrong with you, but perspective changes. I guess an era is just a way of categorizing the phases of your life. My problem is my eras change fast. They’re very short-lived sometimes, but I do think it’s a good way to take your audience on the journey with you. After my EP Love Like That, I put out two or three back-to-back songs — “Channa,” “Noorie” — that were a softer, more feminine visual era, so I’m guilty of doing it too, I just never called it that.

I must’ve been in my “baddie era” when I put out “Beparwai,” and honestly, I still think I’m in that “baddie era.” All my new singles, other than the JP one, fit that — though the JP song was actually written before that phase started, which is the funny thing: when you write and make a song isn’t always in line with the era you release it in. You have to accept that, and that everyone has different sides coexisting at once. I can’t fully commit to just one era, especially when I’m collaborating with someone else whose schedule doesn’t follow my “baddie era” timeline. But I do like the idea of taking the audience with you through a phase, letting them in, staying consistent in it — I think it helps people understand who you are a little better.

What can we expect next from this “baddie era”?

I’m still being picky right now, but there are a few songs I’m really excited to put out. It’s hard to define what “baddie era” even is, but I mean a little more bold, and dancing is a big part of it for me — I’m hoping to put out music that makes people dance in the coming days. I’m still finalizing things, and we’ll be shooting videos very soon — lots of singles in store. But you never know with me — I might throw in a sad song too. Life’s full of sharp turns. You’ve just got to roll with them.