January 28, 2024

 

A few things are occupying my mind at the moment. The return of my boss from his vacation is at the forefront of it all. As expected, we had a board room meeting immediately upon his return to discuss something about Succession Planning. And as I have now come to expect, these meetings very quickly become confusing, circumlocutory brawls where it is best to stay silent and get it over with. There will be much more of this in the new year, this much is clear. I felt somewhat sorry for the two new additions to our team, an American of Korean origin and a Brazilian who was formerly a resident of Chile. The two looked rather hapless as the somewhat argumentative meeting went rambling on. I am sure I had a similar expression in the first few months when I started.

Aside of work, I happened to serendipitously bump into a group of eclectic musicians from India who happen to be a well-established International Touring Band, based in Delhi. They call themselves Peter Cat Recording Co., or PCRC. They have been around for a number of years, but I have only just heard of them. The songs have English lyrics and the music is quite groovy, incorporating aspects of funk, electronica and psychedelia, all centered around the baritone- ish drawl of the frontman Suryakant Sawhney. A fresh sound, and the closest I heard anything from India that could be considered Art Rock. The movement in places like New York and London that had led to the New Age sound and caused the mushrooming of bands like The Velvet Underground, Roxy Music and above all, the mighty Talking Heads- seemingly had now come to Delhi. One already saw lots of Indian English writing in every bookstore in India. There was probably an emerging space for music in English as well- atleast as long as it could be situated under a motif of “art” in a Dada or Warhol sort of way. I already appreciated via a diligent reading of David Byrne’s work on making music, the process and the ethos that leads to the formation of a song in the mind of an artist. This is quite different from the record label creations that are designed to produce formulaic hits to sell records and chart singles at radio stations. When I look at Pop music in a holistic sense, I can categorise them three ways based on this particular lens of viewing. The first is music produced by a record producer, label, DJ and such. This tends to be easy listening, formulaic and catchy. Lyrics are things you can remember, and the chorus tends to stick. It is geared towards the masses. Roxette is a good example. The second music is produced by musicians- here the vocal work and the instrumentation tend to be complex and difficult to replicate- but they often lack soul. Dream Theatre is a good example. The third kind is Art Rock which is more about the artistic expression and articulation than about the music per se. They tend to be created and presented by artists who tend to have imaginations greater than guitar chops. PCRC clearly falls in this category and this has always intrigued me as a person who likes to imagine and then articulate. Yesterday, I must have tuned into the longest live interview I have ever watched on Youtube. It was PCRC frontman Sawhney on a podcast of some sort and it went on unabated for three hours. And during the interview I got more than a glimpse into the inner workings of Sawhney. He made a lot of observations and proferred a litany of insights- all of which I immensely enjoyed and could relate very well to. The fact that his brand of music had managed to pull off a following and that too an international one was really inspiring. I can only imagine the odds of something like this. He mentioned somewhere in the interview that he had visited Berklee school at some point and was invited to a Jam by some of the students- who were almost two decades younger than him. They were all ace musicians but that did not really give them any arrogance. They looked up to Suryakant because PCRC had a following. Great musicians graduate every day from Berklee, but from that to making it in the performing arts scene is a giant and nebulous step. PCRC had managed it against all sorts of odds- and even the 19-year-old upstarts at Berklee had nothing but veneration for that. I found this quite revealing- I would have thought that Berklee kids may have far higher chips on their shoulders than they actually did. The inspiration to become someone is something that I think a lot about these days. The problem is that deep down it is unlikely that I can do that in my current professional avatar. I can plough through but the creative energy has no chance here. That I know is something that I have, that I can compete with others on and I bring something that is fresh. I write songs, play a bit of guitar and piano, and even percussion- and I have somewhere a deep need to go somewhere with this-at minimum just get it out of me. At the moment I am trying to get better at performing solo acoustic items. Thereafter I do hope I can broaden to performing sets not just items. And finally, it would be great if I could showcase my own work somehow. I am more than a decade older than Sawhney, but am similar to him in that ( and I quote)- “ I have a lot of stuff I can be doing, the pipeline of ideas to develop further is chock- a-block but life comes in the way each day to prevent me from moving forward”- I paraphrase him, but this is what he said and this holds completely true for me too. Unlike him, I am not required to make a living out of it (although it does not hurt int he least)- but just get it out of me. If I didn’t, before I died, it would be a regret. It would be a huge deficit in whatever could be referred to as my little legacy, as I see it.