After surprising his audience with soulful songs “I’ll Have to Cry” and “Angel” Indian singer Nikhil Gangavane has lined up more of his philosophical songs to be released this month. We had a little preview of the songs and a chat with him about his future releases.
Congratulations on your new releases!! They seem to be quite different from the first two singles you released, leaving your audience quite surprised.
I have always been telling that I am not groomed to be an artist of a certain genre. I make music that comes to me with words and sounds, everything ready. Since I don’t have a big and known music producer backing me up, I might not always get sounds I want to put in, but I manage to get the closest possible sound that is in my head. So what matters to me is getting the message and the sound across like it came to me.
You are doing everything on your own, that must be quite difficult.
The biggest hurdle for an independent musician is always finance. Age also is a big factor if you are new on the scene, you have a lot of people out there to judge your music depending on how they judge you personally. People make judgements and opinions and then listen to your music with that baggage in their mind. This situation can create a big problem. On one hand, people who love you blindly love your music even if it’s bad and on the other hand people who hate you hate your music even if it’s good. In the age of social media everyone considers oneself as a professional critic, but a professional does a job as a third person. They don’t judge your art influenced by their personal views about you.
What aspects of your songs are you handling yourself?
Everything! Apart from my recording engineer Ishaan Devasthali recording my vocals at the studio, everything else is done by me. I compose the songs, write the lyrics, arrange them, make the track ready and finally after vocals are recorded, I make a lyrical video using either photos or videos that go with the theme of the song.
So is it like you have a readymade collection of songs in your vault and you release them as and when you want to?
I have some compositions with the lyrics ready only for the opening verses. There are a lot of songs at this level but nothing else is done. I have just hummed the leads, harmonies, bass into a mp3 based voice recorder that I had since 2001. As a reference to the vocal file, there is a document based on the filename which says what part requires what kind of sound or other details. So if you consider such raw information as songs in a vault then yes there is, but technically they aren’t even 10% ready.
We had a preview of your new song A LOT MORE TO DO THAN JUST PRAYING, it’s uncanny that something you wrote years ago resonates to today’s situations like COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter.
The song in general speaks about human tendencies that need to change. We all face some evil in our lifetime and also at times most of us are victims to controversy theories that mislead us. In all these times instead of really doing something about the problems we find solace in praying and hoping for a miracle to happen to solve the problem. I find this kind of attitude very frustrating. I believe in prayers but prayers should be backed by some action. Just begging to God or blaming God at times isn’t a solution. That’s why my favourite line from the song goes – “Let’s not wait for God now to take control, our prayers can’t reach so high when we’ve been stooping so low” followed by “Let’s not try to wake up God from the dream we’ve forsaken, it’s we who sleep with open eyes and need to be awakened”. Those lines sum up everything!
The title of the song seems quite long!
Well I was deliberating with myself and with some advisors about the length of the title and decided to go with this one. Just keeping it short like A LOT MORE TO DO or WE’VE LOST OUR FAITH wasn’t really making an impact. I felt the long title makes anyone understand the gist of the song in one go.
Hope you have a strong song in your line-up to cope up this one to maintain the tempo of your releases!
There is a single called “Some People Never Learn”. That song is a bit loud but will resonate with almost everyone! I am very confident about that song. Just wait and watch!
