Vandana Vishwas is a critically acclaimed World Music artist based in Mississauga, ON. Although trained to be an architect, a profession she successfully pursued for over two decades shaping skylines of cities in India, UAE and Canada, Vandana eventually decided to focus her full attention to her passion of music and quit her lucrative career in architecture.
When she was only two days old, Vandana fell victim to an unfortunate medical negligence that left her with a lifelong pain and limited mobility. She could sing complex melodies with ease even as a toddler, prompting her parents to enrol her to learn music formally, and she earned her Sangeet Visharad – a bachelor’s degree in North Indian Classical Vocal music and became an All India Radio artist while still in her teenage. In tandem, she also studied architecture and met her college senior Vishwas Thoke, who would eventually become her musical and life partner.
Her talent took her to Mumbai where she was invited to perform at Acharya Brihaspati Sammelan – a stage where several legendary Indian singers started their musical careers, and she was pursued by several music industry professionals for their projects. Although it had been her childhood dream to become a playback singer, she had to give up that dream with a heavy heart owing to her physical challenges which made it impossible for her to navigate the physically demanding life of Mumbai. So, Vandana decided to devote her attention to architecture, and after her marriage to Vishwas Thoke, the couple moved to Dubai as architects with very little music in her life.
However, things took a turn when the couple immigrated to Toronto, Canada and was immediately won over by the colourful diversity of the City, that exposed them to music from around the world. Upon some coaxing by her husband, Vandana restarted music and released her debut album ‘Meera -The Lover…’ in 2009 which immediately catapulted her into the North American ‘World Music’ scene, with several critical acclaims, awards such as Marty Award by MAC and nomination at several awards including Canadian Indies and OAC’s KM Hunter award for music. This encouraged her to release her second album ‘Monologues’ in 2013, which also received rave reviews and some more awards, landing Vandana with a lot of concerts and recognitions in print, TV, Radio and online media. A year later, Vandana has released her first Single ‘Samarsiddha’ (2014) which is a theme track for similarly titled Hindi Novel by UK based author Sandeep Nayyar, published by Penguin.
Soon afterwards, Vandana decided to quit her lucrative career in architecture to devote her full attention to music, releasing her third album ‘Parallels’ in 2016 which took her experiments with diverse musical genres to another level, featuring her collaborations with several leading artists such as Johannes Linstead, Mark Kelso, Adam Langley, Njacko Backo, Amely Zhou, Richard Henderson, Tim Allan and Ricky Kej. The album stayed on Top 3 spots in RMR World Music charts for 20 straight weeks, topping three weeks in a row. ‘Parallels’ also featured in Top 10 of CMJ World charts and topped the Earshot International charts in 2017. The album also landed her with Toronto Independent Music Award for World Music and a silver medal at Global Music Awards.
Since then, Vandana has released a series of Singles, some her own and some commissioned by other music composers. As music migrated from CDs and Cassettes to online media, the relevance of music albums waned. However, it was always in Vandana’s mind to release an album on legendary historical Indian poet-thinker Kabeer Das, which is coming to fruition in form of her fourth music album ‘Kabeera – The Thinker…’, due to be released on 11 October 2023, while the pre-ordering starts on 27 September 2023.
