Dheekshitha Venkadeshan, professionally known as Dhee has mastered the art of making you want to dance and spiral emotionally at the exact same time. Raised in Australia with Tamil roots, the singer has spent the last few years creating music that feels intimate, and painfully self-aware in the best way possible. From the emotional pull of Ae Sandakara and now Vari Vari, her songs live somewhere between soft nostalgia and full-blown yearning. In a conversation with Indulge, she speaks about identity, emotional honesty, homesickness, and growing up between worlds.
Excerpts:
Can you tell us a bit about how Vari Vari came to be? Was it a means for you to reconnect with your feelings as well?
Vari Vari started because we wanted to make a song that felt timeless but also fun. I don’t have many indie songs that are about love, so we wanted to bring a lot of love into this song. It could be love towards your partner, your child, your parents, my audience, or even yourself. That’s where the song really began for us. That was the initial urge behind making it.I think there were definitely a lot of parallels to what I was feeling at the time. There was a message to myself within the song, and many emotions I was experiencing then naturally manifested into it.
The whole idea of reconnecting with your inner child was something we kept returning to while making the song. That conversation with yourself is something I deeply relate to, just as much as the romantic aspect of the song. So it became both personal and emotional in many different ways.
How do your multicultural Tamil and Australian backgrounds shape your perspective? Does that give you a different emotional lens as an artiste in the way you approach memory, belonging, and love?
It shaped me in a huge way because I don’t really know anything outside of that experience. Those different worlds and experiences are what make me who I am, so they naturally bleed into everything I do, whether I consciously want them to or not. It’s always going to be present in my art and music.
I think these experiences are such a big part of me. Acknowledging and embracing them has made me stronger as a person, and because of that, they’ve also become a big part of my music and artistic identity. Looking into your own background and accepting every side of it gives you a deeper understanding of yourself, and that definitely influences the way I create.
I’ve been feeling a lot of longing recently — longing for a sense of home. I haven’t been to south India in almost two years, and I’ve missed it deeply. My dogs are there, so many people I love are there, and I miss my neighbourhood and so many little things.
At the same time, Sydney is also home, but I haven’t properly lived there in a long time because I’ve been travelling so much for music. So there’s this constant feeling of searching for home or wanting to settle somewhere fully. That feeling has naturally bled into a lot of my recent songwriting.
Even when I try to make something upbeat and fun, there’s still a layer of longing inside it. It’s become something I can’t really avoid in my music anymore. A lot of my newer songs carry that emotion, and I think it comes directly from these experiences of moving between places, identities, and emotions.
The global music landscape has widened so much over the years. How important was it for you to embrace the space between your identities rather than trying to pigeonhole yourself into one?
I think it’s completely okay if someone chooses to lean into one identity and create from that space. I don’t think that’s limiting or wrong in any way.
For me personally, though, I carry many different identities with me. I’m Australian, I’m Tamil, and I spend so much time in Chennai that it genuinely feels like my second home. All of those experiences naturally shape my musical landscape and the way I think about art.
It wasn’t really a conscious decision to embrace multiple identities — it’s simply how my life has unfolded. Because of that, all these influences coexist within my work. I’m grateful to have that outlet creatively, but I also believe there’s no single correct way to approach identity as an artiste.
Growing up around Santhosh Narayanan’s creative world and collaborating with artistes like Pradeep Kumar over the years, what artistic instincts have you absorbed rather than been directly taught?
With Dad (Santhosh Narayanan), one thing I’ve really absorbed is how he can make a song sound fun and simple while still layering it with these incredible and unexpected chords. Even when the music feels effortless, there’s so much depth underneath it. That’s something I really admire and something I naturally look for in music now too. I love hearing surprising, beautiful chord progressions.
With Pradeep, what stands out to me is how deeply he values words. He’s an incredible musician and performer, but when he sings, it feels like he’s genuinely speaking to you. The distance between singing and speaking becomes very small, so you completely believe every lyric he’s delivering.
I love artistes who can do that — where you don’t just hear the melody, you truly feel the meaning of the words. I think Pradeep does that so naturally, and a lot of it comes from the fact that he’s also a songwriter himself.
With Dad, there are honestly so many things I could mention, but definitely his ability to layer rich, interesting chords in the most unexpected ways is something that’s stayed with me creatively.
Songs like Ae Sandakara have continued to resonate with listeners years later. When you revisit your older work, do you also revisit the older version of yourself who created it?
Definitely. When I listen to those songs, I can very clearly remember exactly how I was feeling while recording them. It instantly takes me back to that emotional and mental space.
At the same time, when I perform those songs now, they feel different because I’ve changed as a person. I’ve noticed that I sound more confident now, and there are little emotional differences in the way I approach the performance. Since I’ve lived with these songs for so long, I can hear those changes very clearly.
So revisiting older songs becomes a way of revisiting older versions of myself too. The memories and emotions are still there, but the way I carry them now has evolved.
With receiving recognition and visibility as an artiste, what aspects of your artistry are you most conscious about protecting?
I think the biggest thing for me is protecting my artistic integrity. A lot of people will tell you different things are important in music, and they may not necessarily be wrong. But for me, the most important thing will always be the music itself.
I want to keep learning and keep music at the centre of everything I do. That’s something I constantly try to protect. I also want to make sure that the music I create always feels purposeful and aligned with my beliefs and philosophy.
Those are the things I never want to drift away from. I’m at a stage in my life now where I feel very grounded in those values, and that makes me happy because I don’t think I can really stray away from them anymore.
Beyond music, are there visual arts, fashion, or cinema influences that inspire the way you present your music?
Film inspires me a lot, especially the world of Pixar and Disney movies. It might sound funny, but I genuinely admire how they take really big emotional ideas or philosophies and communicate them in such a simple and accessible way. Anyone can understand them, but they still carry so much depth. That really inspires me creatively because I’m always thinking about how to express something profound in a simple, emotionally direct way.
Fashion inspires me a lot too. Sometimes wearing a particular outfit makes me feel like a completely different character, and immediately there’s a story attached to that feeling. Fashion can communicate so much visually before you even say anything. That’s why I find fashion as such an exciting storytelling medium. Grace Jones is someone who inspires me deeply because of how experimental and expressive she made fashion feel.
So visually, I draw inspiration from many places — film, animation, fashion, storytelling. Disney and Pixar genuinely inspire me a lot in the way they communicate emotion and humanity.
Looking ahead, what kinds of stories, sounds, or creative directions are you excited to explore?
I’m really excited about my upcoming album because it holds so many different stories within it. Some of them are deeply personal, while others come from observing people around me, strangers I’ve met, conversations I’ve heard, and different emotional experiences I’ve absorbed over time.
I think the album carries a lot of those collected emotions and stories, and that’s something I’m really excited to share. I’m also very interested in directing, especially directing music videos, and I’d love to explore that side of creativity more deeply in the future.