For Quiet Light, duality is a fact of life: “Everything is way more connected than we think”

Of all the settings for an NME interview, a Cover star coming straight from a hospital shift might be a first. Yet this is how we find Riya Mahesh, the Texan producer and singer behind the project Quiet Light: on the phone in a comfy T-shirt, just off work at the hospital where she’s on rotation.

“Right now, my life is kind of a ‘9 to 5’ and then ‘5 to 11’,” she says, a hint of exhaustion beneath the excitement. Mahesh is attending medical school on the east coast, “finishing up a few requirements” after taking time off last year for her blossoming indie music career. Since teaching herself to produce during the pandemic, she’s released music prolifically and independently as Quiet Light – “dream sequences”, as she calls them, a delicate blend of folk, alt-pop and ambient soundscapes. Her latest release, the mixtape ‘Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2’, dropped in April and marked her signing to True Panther, the tastemaking label behind Oklou, Grace Ives and Model/Actriz.

Most nights lately, Mahesh’s “5 to 11” means driving from the hospital to a dance studio, rehearsing for her biggest show so far: she’s been handpicked by Olivia Rodrigo to perform at the pop superstar’s new music festival, Daisy Chain Fields. Miraculously, no one at the hospital has any idea. “Still nobody knows! It’s pretty amazing,” Mahesh says cheerfully. It’s a cliché, but she nods when we make the Hannah Montana comparison, having worked incognito alongside colleagues for months. “The stakes are so high – people are literally dying. Your personal life is not part of the equation,” she says of hospital work. “It’s super humbling, and kind of awesome, to go to a job every day where you’re just there to serve other people.”

“It’s pretty crazy watching music turn into more of a job for me, versus before when it was just this thing I did on the side,” she notes. Asked how she’s holding both halves together, she doesn’t pretend to have it solved. “I’ve been trying to be as zen as possible about it and take things day by day.” One thing isn’t in question, though. “I’ve made music my whole life, and I’m never going to stop,” she says. “Whether or not it pays the bills, it’s always going to be the most constant thing in my life.”

Balancing extremes comes naturally to Mahesh, who was the kid doing a dozen extracurriculars in high school. She still surrounds herself with friends juggling just as much. “I feel like that’s what Gen Z is like. Everybody has 20 side hustles, trying to navigate the state of the world and get the bag in various ways,” she observes. It’s part of a wider belief system she’s developed that people are more multi-faceted than they seem. “People get very left-brain, right-brain about everything,” she says, pointing to a common misconception that musicians aren’t good at math. “But music theory and production are so rooted in mathematics. Everything is way more connected than we think, if we can just set aside our biases.”

The instinct to hold multiple truths at once was within her from the start. Mahesh grew up in an Indian family in Dallas, Texas (“the most suburban place you could ever imagine”), and sought escape from its “unfathomable levels of mundanity” in music and art – drawn to David Lynch and The Virgin Suicides for their insistence that there’s always more beneath a placid surface. Her own story, though, had a definitively “normcore” chapter: Mahesh spent her high school years crushing on boys, going to football games and being crowned prom queen. “Very Friday Night Lights,” she jokes.

“Music is always going to be the most constant thing in my life”

Underneath the normalcy was a genuinely serious classical education. Her mother, a skilled sitar player, had her learning piano by age four – “one of the most fruitful educational experiences of my life,” she says, though she took a while to fall in love with it. “Things in my house could be chaotic. I remember finding the most peace sitting at the piano practising – learning that no matter how crazy things get, you can always sit down at the piano and enter this separate flow state.”

Her middle school choir director later noticed her singing voice and pushed her toward lessons, setting her on a path toward classical opera that led to an application to Juilliard. She didn’t get in. “I think that shaped a lot of my early twenties,” she says, “that belief that I wasn’t good enough.” It sent her the “complete other way” – away from music as a career, and toward making it purely for her own enjoyment and inspiration.

That reorientation accelerated at university in Austin, where Mahesh joined the college radio station and fell in with a crowd who introduced her to Life Without Buildings and Weyes Blood. Quiet Light, she says, was born out of reconciling her two selves: “taking my past and present, something old and something new, and bringing them together”.

She’d always assumed that “making music” meant being flown out to some Los Angeles studio to sing over a producer’s beat – until she learned that Clairo had made many of her breakout records alone. “People maybe underestimate the impact Clairo has had on self-produced female musicians,” she says. “I remember being 19, listening to ‘Immunity’, and thinking I could probably teach myself to do this too.” So she did: teaching herself production on Logic, watching producer friends work over their shoulders, then setting about doing everything herself – writing, singing, producing, mixing – joining what she sees as a wider wave of self-produced women, alongside the likes of Erika de Casier and PinkPantheress.

Instead of one viral spike, Quiet Light and her fanbase have grown “organically” as more people find the music and come to shows every year. Mahesh, who will tour Europe and the UK later this year, counts herself lucky. “I’m not The Dare, which is freeing in a way,” she says. “I really didn’t think the music would mean anything to anyone except me, so it feels really special.”

“I never had that self-belief most artists have at a young age, that they’re destined for greatness,” she continues. “I’ve always been doubtful of my own musical talent. Anytime anything good happens, I’m just shocked.” When a song from her first ‘Blue Angel’ record appeared on a Spotify editorial playlist, her first reaction was pure panic: “I remember thinking, ‘What? People know about this?!’”

“I remember being 19, listening to Clairo’s ‘Immunity’, and thinking I could probably teach myself to do this too”

Signing to True Panther earlier this year took things to a new level. Six years of doing everything alone had made her a true “auteur”, taking the time to hone and execute her exact vision of Quiet Light. But self-sufficiency was reaching its natural ceiling: “I had ideas that were bigger than what I could do with my MacBook Pro.” Self-releasing music was also lonelier than she expected. “I’d put out a song, people would listen for a day or two, and everyone would forget about it.” Having a team now has been “really good for my mental health”, she shares. “It’s nice to have people with you to share in your success or failure.”

It’s partially changed how she sees the industry, too. Once a pessimist who used to resent the heavy emphasis on music marketing and pressure on artists to “really sell the product”, she now points to the likes of PinkPantheress “building a whole brand around plaid”, or Charli XCX’s immersive swerve from ‘Brat’ to ‘Music, Fashion, Film’, as proof that reinvention and creative direction can present real opportunity. “It’s actually a really amazing time to be an artist,” she says. “A couple of years ago, I would not have said that.”

Which brings us to the festival she still can’t quite believe she’s playing. Having grown up watching the Disney Channel, Mahesh “holds a special place in my heart” for Rodrigo and her music. “I think she’s an amazing role model for young women,” she says. “I feel so happy that this generation of young girls gets to see a pop star be such a champion for women’s reproductive rights. It’s crazy because she’s younger than me, but I look up to her.”

Quiet Light will be the first artist in the line-up to perform at Daisy Chain Fields, which takes place in Irvine, California this Saturday (August 29). Quiet Light shows have historically been solo or minimalist affairs, but this weekend she’ll perform with a full band for the first time. “I’m all about a challenge,” she says, brightening also at the news that her Austin friends, and past NME Cover stars, Die Spitz are also on the bill. “It feels like a homecoming.”

The all-women, Lilith Fair-inspired bill – from Rodrigo, Chappell Roan and Doechii to Garbage, The Breeders and Bikini Kill – is performing for free, raising money for charities supporting women and girls, especially reproductive health. As a healthcare worker and “Texas girl at heart”, Mahesh feels the connection personally. “Things involving women’s bodies are really going to shit in Texas,” she says. “It really feels like we’re going backwards as a society. I’ve been trying to adopt a more hopeful mindset and work to make things better in my own way.”

But what she’d most like people to take from her story isn’t the charmed trajectory – it’s the fact that there wasn’t one. “People assume musicians know who they are from a very young age,” she says. “I’ve felt confused pretty much every day of my life. But holding space for that confusion, and for something impossible to happen anyway – that’s ended up being true. I just hope that message can carry to someone who’s young and confused too.”

Quiet Light performs at Daisy Chain Fields in Irvine, California on August 29. She tours Europe and the UK in support of ‘Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2’ from October.

Listen to Quiet Light’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Cordelia Lam
Photography: Sophia Liv Maguire
Makeup: Liz Victoria
Label: True Panther Records