Introducing Padma, WBUR’s favorite local Tiny Desk Contest entry

In Padma’s entry to the 2025 NPR Tiny Desk Contest, appearances can be deceptive. Set in a dim apartment with loud vintage wallpaper, the video features Padma crouched on the floor, illuminated in the glow of her laptop screen, with her bandmates arranged around her in the shadows. Further glimpses of the minimally-furnished house reveal an old stereo receiver, an upright piano and a lot of wood paneling.

Against this scrappy backdrop, Padma delivers a banger. “Good Sign” is a pop song in the purest sense, with a sticky melody and a tight structure. It contains self-deprecating lines that wouldn’t be out of place in a song by Sabrina Carpenter — “Now my heart’s racing/ God, I’m screwed” — and flashes of poetry worthy of Taylor Swift: “You’re like the rain upstate/ You’re everywhere, it always pours.” Padma, who sings with silvery sweetness, deftly depicts the early stages of infatuation, when good sense bravely fights a losing battle against hormones. “Is two weeks too soon to fall for you?” Padma wonders, echoing the thoughts of lovelorn 20-year-olds the world over.

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It was this wry relatability that led our panel of local judges — myself, Shea Rose, Marquis Neal, Maddie Browning and Susan Cattaneo — to choose Padma’s “Good Sign” as WBUR’s Favorite Local Tiny Desk Contest Entry. Over 200 artists from Massachusetts entered NPR’s contest, and the competition among them was fierce. But “Good Sign” stood out next to slicker-looking videos. Padma and her collaborators, director Brandon Kim and videographer Elvin Zhang, made smart use of their humble milieu; by arranging the band throughout different rooms in the house, they were able to shoot the same performance from various angles and cut them together, imbuing a static setting with a sense of movement. But ultimately, it was Padma’s songwriting that won the day.

Padma is the stage name of Padma Mynampaty, a 21-year-old from Southborough. I met up with her on a recent afternoon on the campus of Harvard Business School, where she was performing for employees as part of a free summer concert series. Her father, who works in the school’s IT department, filmed her on his phone as she sang acoustic covers of Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen, which were greeted by smatterings of applause from people scattered around the yard.

Padma was home on summer break from Syracuse University’s Bandier Program, which trains undergraduates for business-side roles in the music industry, like artist development and marketing. Her father, Ravi Mynampaty, remarked that he was glad she had chosen a pragmatic area of study, although he hadn’t insisted on it. “My understanding is half the kids [in the program] are budding musicians, and this is their way of hedging their bets,” he said. “You have to pay the bills somehow.”

Padma connects her love of music to her paternal grandmother, who is herself a singer and a poet. The two are very close. “I make chai for her every day at home,” Padma told me in an interview that afternoon. “And when we’re drinking it, she’ll show me videos of Indian singing competitions and she’ll be like, ‘I want you to sing like this.’”

Padma studied piano and Indian classical singing as a child, but she didn’t start writing songs until she was a teenager. Her early recordings, which she published on Soundcloud, were yearning and stripped down, a preternatural sense of melody and structure already apparent. Sometimes, she would try to incorporate ideas from the Indian ragas she had studied. But her bigger influences were more pop-oriented: Taylor Swift, Nora Jones, John Mayer. She recalled hearing John Denver for the first time. “‘Sunshine On My Shoulders’ made me bawl,” Padma said. “Whenever I’m going through a rough time, I always listen to that, and it grounds me, in a way.”

Then came an unexpected breakthrough. When Padma was a sophomore in high school, a coworker of her mother’s sent her Soundcloud to Sheel Davé, the drummer in the Boston pop-funk band Bad Rabbits.

“ At first I was like, 'Oh, great, you're only sending this to me because she's Indian and I'm Indian,'” Davé told me. But he gave the Soundcloud a listen. “I was completely blown away,” he said. “I think it was just the timbre and the tone of her voice. It was just so sweet and authentic and emotional.”

Under Davé’s mentorship, Padma traveled to Los Angeles and began meeting with producers to collaborate on songs. Davé helped her put together her first EP, “Daisy.” The project, which came out in 2022, is shimmery and confident, a collection of moody bops and vivid storytelling. “All I ever wanted was to cleanse your pain/ Would’ve rather drowned than watch you sink,” Padma sings on “Beltway,” a wistful pop song about a troubled ex. “Water in my palm slips through my grip/ Had a taste of you, now I can’t quit.”

Padma is in the midst of finishing her next EP. Davé, who recently welcomed his second child, hasn’t been able to spend as much time helping her. “ I could tell that it was a little bit of reality check to understand that she is still on her own,” he said. The music business, Davé pointed out, is difficult to navigate, even for a talented musician who already has connections in the industry, like Padma. She is not signed to a label and doesn’t have a manager.

“ We've reached out to many distributors and labels and publishers that really enjoy her and think she's special,” Davé said. “But they go right to the data, they go to her Spotify and [ask], ‘How many monthly listeners do you have? Not enough for us to give you money,’ you know? So that's the reality right there.”

Padma’s visits to LA — she tries to go a few times a year — have nevertheless been fruitful. When she’s there, she makes the rounds on songwriting sessions with producers, usually set up by a label’s A&R division. Sometimes those sessions result in finished recordings; collectively, they have helped her hone her craft.

“ I've definitely learned how to convey what I mean in less words,” Padma said. “Collaboration is the best part of making music.”

That lesson may serve her well when she graduates from college next year. She is considering moving to New York City, and hopes to get connected in the writing scene there. “ I love writing with the intent of, this isn't for me, this could be for anyone,” Padma said.

She has already proven a knack for getting inside someone else’s head. When she sat down to write “Good Sign,” in a session with the producer B. Lewis, she felt like there wasn’t anything going on in her own life that was worth writing about. So she channeled one of her peers.

“ One of my friends had just started getting into a relationship and she'd been talking to me about how she's been feeling and how it all happened so quick and like, is that okay, to fall that quick?” Padma recalled. “And I was like, I think falling for someone that quick is really beautiful, and also innocent.”

She remembers thinking one particular line in “Good Sign” was likely to resonate: “God, I’m screwed.” She could picture how a crowd might respond to that lyric, how it had the power to elicit catharsis. “Hearing someone physically singing that at a concert,” Padma said. “You can see how they would be singing it back to you.”