DESCRIPTION:
Goldspot's Siddhartha Khosla and Jake Owen performed three songs at Mrs. Obama's Diwali celebration at the White House on November 5, 2013. This is one of the performances - "The Evergreen Cassette" off the album "Aerogramme."

From Sid:

"My parents came to the US from India in the late '70s to start a new life. They came here with just eight dollars in their pockets and two university scholarships. And then I was born. They realized that it was really difficult to go to school, make a living and take care of a child. They didn't have the money to afford great babysitters and '70s New Haven was not the safest place.

So they sent me back to India for a couple of years to live with my grandparents.

At the time, it was incredibly expensive to make an international phone call between India and the United States. So my mom had to find some way to communicate with me. She was without her son in a new country and just wanted to sing her baby a lullaby and tell him that she loved him.

She sent an evergreen-colored cassette tape to me in India; on it she sang me songs and told me stories. I would then record over that same tape and we would send it back and forth over the course of two years.

What made the White House performance even more special is that my parents were there to hear this performance.