Sooraj Balaji's music career has made a drastic swing from hardcore rock music to Indipop. Nisha Chainani talks to Sooraj and his religion music which has no boundaries, be it Pop, Rock or Raga.

I started out as a musician by a series of coincidences. One day I was sitting down with  a group   of friends who happened to be musicians and they started playing and I started singing for them  though I wasn't a musician and they liked what they heard and they asked me to join them in their band. Then I was  invited to come for rehearsals and the moment I started singing I kind of decided that this is what I want to do.

And it was very  fortunate for me too, that things  happened the way they did because I was nineteen with no where to go. I mean I had to do my college  thorough correspondence because I was so not inclined towards studies. I had no aim, I had no goal so when I went into the rehearsal room that day and sang, I knew that this is what I wanted to do.

But that band didn't last for long. The guys in the band were all professional musicians doing other jobs for studio's and that sort of thing, they were not really putting their best foot forward for the band. So we all broke up and everyone went their separate ways and I went hunting around for musicians to form another band.

Then with Ryan on the base, Sudhir on the guitar, Anish on the drums, Kartik on the keyboards and me as the vocalist we formed a band we called Krysys. And we played everywhere, all over Bombay. We played at several of the Independent Rock Concerts, at Mood Indigo, and once we even entered a competition held by Mood I where I won best vocalist and Sudhir won best guitarist and we came second as a band.

Our band also toured several cities, like Bangalore, Nagpur, Poona, Madras, Hyderabad and not only were we paid good money for the shows but we were treated like rock stars and the works! I mean, airplane tickets, five star accommodations, full payment before the concert, mobs and hysteria, people coming to meet us, MTV wanting to interview us, it was incredible. At the same time not forgetting all the gratitude that goes out to Rock Machine who did all the struggling and hard work to get that kind of acceptance and recognition for rock music in India. We were only riding on the success that they had created for themselves and for everybody else who followed their path.

My trip with Krysys lasted for about six years then I went to Hong Kong and stayed there for two years. My girlfriend got a job with Cathy Pacific and since we were inseparable, I thought why not check out the scene there. So once again I collected a bunch of guys and formed a band called the Matchbox with Marc, a former band member with Rock Machine, who was living in Hong Kong at the time. And we cashed in on all the Beatles tracks because they came to be such a rage with all the pubs and bars. We even got a write up with the English local paper called the South China Morning Post which was a rare and awesome thing for a small band we thought nobody even went home and thought about. Pretty soon we discovered that we even had a fan following.

And all that was really exciting but it soon began to wear off because we were doing the same old thing  over and  over again. We  were singing other peoples covers and  I was  getting tired of it. I wanted to create our own music, I wanted us to write our own songs but except for me and one other young 18 year old Australian guy none of the other band members were interested.

So the two of us got together and tried to come up with a few things but that didn't work out very well. Nathan was a lousy writer, and on top of it all he was whopped in the head. And that's when I decided to go back home. I didn't like Hong Kong very much anyway.

Back home I hooked up with some of the guys from Krysys though I didn't join the band again and while we were thinking of doing something, Druve and Ashitosh from Chrakravue, the band that did the sound track for Bombay Boys, asked us to join them as guitarist and vocalist. This lasted for about a year. What I really liked about this band was that we were doing a lot of originals. But in those days people were not into listening to originals so we got booed off the stage a lot. I remember this one time we did a show where we played three covers and then for the rest of the show we played originals, and there were these bunch of guys in the front who just wanted to kill us! They were totally pissed off! Then Druve went off to the States and the drummer also went off to the States and that was the end of Chrakravue.

Then my next big plan was to move to Australia, migrate, and while all that was happening another band called the Spirals met me asked me to join them and since I liked their music I hooked up with them on the understanding that it was only temporary until things work out with my plans to go to Australia. Our association lasted a year!

And the last rock band that I sang for was with a band I formed almost half-heartedly called Face Lift with two guys from Pentagram and the drummer from Chrakravue. We only performed four times and that was it. It was just something I did to keep myself occupied in between trying to cut a record deal.

Then one day I was at Gogi's studio at Wadala, I think I had gone there for a jingle when Gogi asked me to sing a song from a demo made by some other musicians. It was in Hindi and he just wanted to see how I sounded singing in Hindi so I sang and it sounded pretty good, so we made a demo with my voice and the next thing I know is that I had signed a Hindi pop album with Milestone.

The album was titled Musafir and it was out last year. We made one video of the title track which did very well but the over all sales of the album was good though nothing to brag about. Perhaps we should have made another video to promote and boost sales.

The strangest thing, however, is that the album is still selling a whole year later despite it not being so well publicized and not being in the news and not blaring on car speakers. So the company has decided to relaunch the album with a remixed version of the sound tracks and that's what I'm doing here at Om studio, working on that. And hopefully now it will get the recognition I really think it deserves.

Like I was saying earlier, life for me has been a voyage of coincidences. I found my soul in singing and that's what I'm going to continue to do, English, Hindi, rock, pop, it's all the same religion to me!