MS Krsna’s 'Nejama?' is a memoir in music, shaped by family and memory

There are things we inherit without realising it. A voice, a song, the sound of an instrument, somebody laughing in the next room. Years later, they can become a record. That is what makes MS Krsna’s debut EP, Nejama?, a memoir in music. The six-track project gathers work written almost entirely between the ages of 20 and 23, a period Krsna describes as the most challenging, exciting, beautiful, and life-changing he has lived through. The songs stayed with him for years. Now, finally, he is ready to let them go.
“I still feel like this is way too personal for me to release,” Krsna admits. “I can’t believe I'm going to put myself out there and put these truths of my life out there in this way.”

From Yennamma Thozhi to Nejama?, MS Krsna follows memory back home

The opening visual, titled Intro, uses childhood footage, family videos, and voice notes, introducing listeners to the people and memories that shaped what follows. “I want listeners to meet the characters in my life that have informed the music,” he says. Even decades from now, he says, if he returns to the intro, “it's going to have the voices of the people I love."

He wants the album heard in the order he has arranged it, almost like entering in medias res and gradually discovering why each sound and memory belongs there. Even the voices return. The first song and the final, yet-to-be-released Paatti Song begin and end with the same voices, creating what Krsna calls a kind of bookmark.

That idea of memory runs through the sound of the EP too. Krsna worked closely with his friend Paul Daniel, the recording engineer for the entire album and mixer for most of the tracks, to build a different sonic world for each song. The choices are deeply personal. The mridangam, the first instrument Krsna ever learnt, appears on the opening track. There is a 16-year-old guitar his mother bought for him. On Yennamma Thozhi, Krsna brings in nadaswaram and tavil, played by a musician whose family has known his own for years. Krsna also recorded the jalathrangam himself, an instrument his great-grandmother Seetha Doraiswamy played. “She's no more, but I had the honour of learning from her directly as a child,” he says. He also credits Sethu and Balu Thankachan for opening up their studio to the album and giving the project the space in which to take shape.

The musician is interested in the emotional truth of a recording as much as its technical beauty. “Sometimes you need to break the rules to show that imperfection and show the humane element of what we're trying to do,” he says. Musically, Nejama? is also a considerable expansion of his palette. Some combinations are deliberately unexpected. A dobro guitar, with its country and bluegrass associations, sits alongside tavil and nadaswaram. Family members become a choir. Friends, who Krsna jokingly calls the “most out-of-pitch singers in the world”, were recorded because the story demanded their voices.

Even the visuals follow the same. Rather than reaching for the endless possibilities of digital imagery, Krsna wanted the album to remain close to what is real. The Yennamma Thozhi visuals were shot in Kumbakonam, his mother’s hometown, including a field of yellow flowers that happened to match the colour he had always associated with the song due to his chromesthesia. The title track is, in his head, almost emerald green, while the EP as a whole moves through yellow, sky blue and teal.

The song itself reaches much further back. Krsna remembers his aunt introducing it to the family, after which the children picked it up, followed by his mother and grandmother. He later traced the lullaby’s history back roughly 80 years, including its connection to a workshop at Krishnamurti Foundation India, long before a film version brought it to wider recognition.

But for Krsna, Yennamma Thozhi is not simply about the loss of a doll. He hears it as a bittersweet story about what can be gained through loss. In his interpretation, a little sister loses her doll and her elder brother goes out into the world to find it. The nadaswaram and tavil interlude moves into Neelambari, the lullaby raga, allowing the child’s imagination to travel somewhere beyond the immediate world of the song. It is an arrangement choice, but also a memory of how children dream. “When a child closes its eyes and imagines where the doll is going to be, it could be anywhere in the world,” he says, perhaps another child in a mountain or a forest, somewhere completely removed from the world of the song.

There is another layer to the arrangement. The song references Aipasi Maasam Kaveri Snanam, placing the story around a festival during which Krsna imagines the doll being bought. “For a festival of that time period, I feel like tavil and nadaswaram would have been the music that was there in that festival,” he says. The instruments therefore become more than an arrangement choice; they recreate the imagined soundscape surrounding the child's memory. He sees the song as an opportunity to think about “healing your inner child and healing what feels lost within you”. What has been lost could be joy, comfort, exploration or simply “that childlike wonder for life”. And, crucially, finding those things again does not always happen alone. Sometimes it is the people who enter our lives who help us find our way back.

That is what Nejama? does best. It takes specific memories and leaves enough room for listeners to find their own inside them.

Krsna hopes that, ten years from now, listeners will be able to approach the 2026 version of him through the music. More than admiration, he wants recognition: the feeling that, somewhere inside these very specific memories, there is something familiar. “I hope they feel like they can almost put their hands through the veil and feel my presence, if they can feel that they have a friend in me through the music, that would be the biggest victory,” he says. “When I listen to John Mayer’s music, I feel like I’m his friend,” he says. “I can almost relate to who he is and what he’s going through.” That is the kind of intimacy he wants to create here.

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