Benjamin Ashford|How M. Night Shyamalan's 'Trap' became his daughter Saleka's 'Purple Rain'

It sounds like a plot for one of her dad’s thrillers: When Saleka Night Shyamalan started taking classical piano lessons,Benjamin Ashford practice was mandatory. Three hours a day, every day. It was always there, whether at home or on vacation with her parents. There was no escape.

“Oh, yeah, that wasn't a choice for me,” Shyamalan says, laughing. “I cried many times. And they were like, ‘No, no, you keep going ...’ ”

Her Oscar-nominated father, director M. Night Shyamalan, chuckles when confirming this. “It was intense. It was definitely an Asian tiger parents kind of thing.”

All that time spent has interestingly paid off for both of them. Saleka, 28, is now an on-the-rise R&B pop singer and a prolific songwriter, crafting a soundtrack of original tunes for her dad's new movie “Trap” (in theaters now).

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She also has a role in the film: Serial-killing father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his teen Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert by megastar Lady Raven (Saleka), who becomes caught up in Cooper’s escape attempt when he discovers the show is a large-scale trap to capture him.

While getting to play a main character is “very exciting,” Saleka acknowledges that it was “definitely out of my comfort zone.” Like her filmmaking sister Ishana, who recently directed the thriller “The Watchers” (and several of Saleka’s music videos), she’d rather be behind the camera. 

“In a studio producing a song, recording by myself, writing by myself – that's my happy place,” Saleka says. “In our family, we are all in love with the art of filmmaking and also the art of music. Bringing those two things together is such a magical experience.”

“Trap” is part concert film, with Saleka singing and dancing as Lady Raven through several numbers. Both she and Shyamalan love Prince’s “Purple Rain,” and Shyamalan wanted a soundtrack where “the buoyancy and the artistry of the music is affecting the movie in a significant way,” he says.

So Shyamalan wrote a script that called for 14 songs that Saleka would write, perform, mix and produce, plus learn a bunch of choreography. “It was insane,” he says. “I was saying to her, ‘I'm not sure how many people on the planet could do what I'm asking you to do, but I'm asking you to do it anyway.’ ” 

Saleka figures it was the “fastest” she’s ever written a batch of songs, not only because she was on a timetable but also because she was inspired by everything happening in the movie. And while it’s not exactly a concept album, the “Trap” soundtrack does have a flow that coincides with the film. 

“In the beginning, it's kind of fun and witty, then it moves into this darker and more intense, upbeat space where things are getting crazy,” Saleka explains. “It comes back into this more intimate moment at the end and then a celebration as the last song.”

The songs she wrote are also the genre and sound she aims to move into. “The R&B influence is still in there and there's a little bit of Latin and Indian influence,” Saleka says. “Because I was imagining it in a stadium and thinking of this big pop star, it did have this bigger pop feel than my other records.”

While her dad and sister’s domain is film, “music was always my thing,” says Saleka, who toured with R&B singer Giveon in 2022 and also opened for Boyz II Men. By her midteens, she was writing songs, combining the music theory from 11 years of classical piano with the inspiration of jazz and blues singers like Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and Etta James to “improvise and riff and be spontaneous and create my own things."

Shyamalan says he never could have imagined those piano lessons would turn into this.

“Her brain got wired in this way from those thousands and thousands of hours," he says. “We've always been a little bit in awe of her musical ability from when she was a baby till now. Just being around her process, being side by side with another artist that I admire … it was just exciting.”

And if an “Eras Tour”-style Saleka concert film comes to pass, who’s directing it: Her dad or her sister? “Whoever says yes,” Saleka laughs. “They'll probably both be too busy for me at that point. I'll have to beg one of them.”