Mahesh, who performs as Quiet Light, looks up to Olivia Rodrigo as a role model for young women and reproductive‑rights advocacy. She will headline the all‑women Daisy Chain Fields festival in Irvine, California on August 29, playing with a full band for the first time alongside acts such as Die Spitz, Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Doechii, Garbage, The Breeders and Bikini Kill.
The free concert raises money for charities that support women’s and girls’ health, especially reproductive health—a cause that resonates personally with Mahesh as a Texas‑based healthcare worker. She hopes her message—that it’s normal to feel confused and that a clear early path isn’t needed—will reach young people who feel uncertain. After the festival, Quiet Light will tour Europe and the UK in support of her album “Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2” beginning in October.
For Quiet Light, duality is a fact of life: “Everything is way more connected than we think.” When she is not on shift at the hospital, Riya Mahesh crafts beautiful electronic‑ambient‑folk that has captured the attention of tastemaking label True Panther and pop star Olivia Rodrigo.
An NME interview setting rarely features a cover star fresh from a hospital rotation, yet that is exactly where we find the Texan producer and singer behind Quiet Light. She speaks to us on the phone, wearing a comfortable T‑shirt, just finished with her shift at the medical facility where she is on rotation.
“Right now, my life is kind of a ‘9 to 5’ and then ‘5 to 11’,” she admits, a hint of exhaustion threading through her excitement. Mahesh is completing medical school on the east coast, tying up a few requirements after taking a break last year to nurture her blossoming indie music career. Since teaching herself production during the pandemic, she has released music prolifically and independently as Quiet Light—what she calls “dream sequences,” 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 label behind acts such as Oklou, Grace Ives and Model/Actriz.
Most evenings, Mahesh’s “5 to 11” means driving from the hospital to a dance studio, rehearsing for her biggest show to date. She has been handpicked by Olivia Rodrigo to perform at the pop superstar’s new music festival, Daisy Chain Fields. Remarkably, none of her colleagues at the hospital are aware of her musical pursuits. “Still nobody knows! It’s pretty amazing,” she says cheerfully. When we draw the Hannah Montana comparison, she nods, having worked incognito alongside teammates for months. “The stakes are so high—people are literally dying. Your personal life is not part of the equation,” she reflects on 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.”
She notes how music has shifted from a side hobby to a more job‑like pursuit. Asked how she balances both halves, she does not claim to have solved the puzzle. “I’ve been trying to be as zen as possible about it and take things day by day.” One certainty remains: “I’ve made music my whole life, and I’m never going to stop. Whether or not it pays the bills, it’s always going to be the most constant thing in my life.”
Balancing extremes feels natural to Mahesh, who was the high‑schooler juggling a dozen extracurriculars. She still surrounds herself with friends who manage similarly packed schedules. “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. This outlook feeds a broader belief system: people are more multi‑faceted than they appear. “People get very left‑brain, right‑brain about everything,” she says, pointing to the myth that musicians cannot handle 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 has been present since childhood. 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” through music and art, drawn to David Lynch and The Virgin Suicides for their insistence that there is always more beneath a placid surface. Her own story includes a definitively “normcore” chapter: high‑school years spent crushing on boys, attending football games and being crowned prom queen. “Very Friday Night Lights,” she jokes.
Beneath that surface lay a serious classical foundation. Her mother, a skilled sitar player, had her learning piano at age four—“one of the most fruitful educational experiences of my life,” she recalls, though it took time to fall in love with the instrument. “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 encouraged lessons, steering her toward classical opera and an application to Juilliard. She did not gain admission. “I think that shaped a lot of my early twenties,” she says, “that belief that I wasn’t good enough.” The rejection pushed her the “complete other way”—away from music as a career and toward making it purely for personal enjoyment and inspiration.
That reorientation accelerated at university in Austin, where Mahesh joined the college radio station and fell in with a crowd that introduced her to Life Without Buildings and Weyes Blood. Quiet Light emerged from reconciling her two selves: “taking my past and present, something old and something new, and bringing them together.”
She once assumed that “making music” meant flying to a Los Angeles studio to sing over a producer’s beat—until she learned that Clairo had crafted many of her breakout records alone. “People maybe underestimate the impact Clairo has had on self‑produced female musicians,” she notes. “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 Erika de Casier and PinkPantheress.
Instead of relying on a single viral spike, Quiet Light and her fanbase have grown organically as more people discover the music and attend shows each year. Mahesh, who will tour Europe and the UK later this year, counts herself fortunate. “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.”
She admits she never possessed the self‑belief many young artists feel—that they are destined for greatness. “I’ve always been doubtful of my own musical talent. Anytime anything good happens, I’m just shocked.” When a track from her first “Blue Angel” record landed on a Spotify editorial playlist, her first reaction was pure panic: “I remember thinking, ‘What? People know about this?!’”
Signing to True Panther earlier this year elevated her career. Six years of solo work had turned her into a true “auteur,” allowing her to refine and execute her exact vision for Quiet Light. Yet self‑sufficiency hit its natural ceiling: “I had ideas that were bigger than what I could do with my MacBook Pro.” Releasing music alone also felt lonelier than anticipated. “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.”
This partnership has also reshaped her view of the industry. Once a pessimist who resented the heavy emphasis on marketing and the pressure on artists to “really sell the product,” she now points to acts like PinkPantheress “building a whole brand around plaid” or Charli XCX’s immersive shift 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.”
