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Nitin Sawhney Where do you start with Nitin Sawhney? His skills as a musician, songwriter and producer are simply staggering, and his range is so broad. As the Guardian put it: “It would be easier to jot down what this man can’t do than what he can.” Although it was his Mercury Music Prize nomination, and South Bank Show Award for the Beyond Skin album in 1999 that really launched him into view, Nitin had already been involved in the industry for some time. On May 2nd 2005, his seventh studio album in just eleven years, Philtre, will be released. Prolific is hardly the word, especially when you consider that he’s also scored over twenty-five films, with several more on the way, as well as TV ads and TV dramas. The list stretches on and on. But rather than us trying to pile on any more superlatives to a man who’s proved his worth time and again, why don’t we see what he has to say for himself? We spoke to an impassioned Nitin gearing up for the launch of the new album, as philosophical and eloquent as from listening to his music you’d expect him to be.
PIXELSURGEON: Hello Nitin. Thanks for taking time out to talk to us. Philtre is to be your 7th studio album. Was there a central motivation for this album that made the process different in some way to your previous albums?
I think I wanted to make an album that was probably a bit lighter perhaps, and a bit more optimistic. That really is the vibe of it. Philtre means healing potion or healing power, and it is about the way I feel about music. I guess I was kind of in the middle of watching all the stuff to do with the war and then the tsunami, and how much more priority people give to 9/11 than they give do to what happened on Boxing Day, where 300,000 people dying as opposed to 4000. And you kind of think, well, I’m a bit of sick of it all to be honest. I just wanted to make an album like when I watch the news sometimes, and I come downstairs and just play the piano or play the guitar and feel better afterwards. So I wanted to make an album that grows in energy and has the same kind of flow to it.
When did you decide it was time to make a new album? Was there a moment when you thought that you were ready, or do you just work through and make new songs all the time?
I suppose that I come up with ideas first. I think through what it is that I want to say and how I’m gonna say it. Sometimes I’ll collaborate with people. If I’m working on my own then it’s very different, but if I’m collaborating with someone then it’s just bouncing ideas off them sometimes. So it’s a different kind of process; sometimes I’ll sit down and work out a piano riff, sometimes a guitar riff, a chord structure…or I’ll work on lyrics, but it just depends on what is going on. And sometimes I’ll even just drop the beat and work with that.
So do you seek out specific people you want to collaborate with from the very beginning?
Yeah that is exactly what happens. I mean for instance with Vikter Duplaix, I’d been Djing at Fabric and I was playing a remix of one of his tracks from Bugz in the Attic. I said to Sumit, my manager, it’d be really wicked to work with this guy; he’s got a killer voice. So he said he’d see if he could sort it out, and he got him down from Philadelphia, because apparently he likes my stuff as well. I had no idea, and so he came down, and he sang in my house and it was really cool. You know I had worked out the chord structure and we just worked together really easily. He’s a brilliant singer: a really great voice.
You’re an incredibly prolific artist. Are you the kind of person who writes exactly as much material as you need, or do you reject lots of stuff too?
No actually, what I feel really happy about is that what I record almost invariably ends up on the album. I mean this album was done over a stretch of about three months really, which is pretty quick ‘cos in that time I also went to India and also did some recording there as well. I’d invite people down to my house, even the string quintets and things like that, just to come and record, but it sounds like a big album in terms of production, and that’s what makes me happy. Just trying to get that sound, it’s a good process. I really enjoyed it.
On this album you’ve worked with several new musicians, like Fink from Ninja Tune for instance. Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah he’s cool, he’s actually a friend of Sumit and I’d heard his stuff on Ninja Tune which is great, and also I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s a lovely guy and he’s a really really good producer of his own stuff. There was a track that he did with Tina (Grace) from the band. It had this good old kind of blues sound to it, and I thought wow, this is really cool. So I got him to sing on Dead Man ‘cos I really wanted an old bluesy voice. But I actually thought his sound was great; it was good mixing it in with the Bengali stuff as well, it seemed to throw people, but I liked doing that, and it was a really good reaction.
And what about the people you’re working with again? Tina Grace, Jayanta Bose and so on…Naturally, you work with these people for their musical skills in particular, but what is it that keeps you coming back to them specifically?
At the end of the day they are just good. The thing about them is that they can express emotion like no one else I know. Tina is almost like a female Damien Rice at times. She’s got this amazing quality in her voice and she expresses herself rather than sings; that’s what I like about her. She did a little gig recently at the top of some pub nearby, and it was so cool. People came down and were just flipping about it. She really is completely herself when she’s singing. She comes up with beautiful lyrics, and she really expresses a lot of emotion. And it is the same with Jayanta. He’s got a really good quality. You know I’d go to the ends of the earth for these people ‘cos I don’t mind travelling to India and recording him. Sometimes when he’s around here then it’s great, but I’ll always want his voice on an album ‘cos it’s just got a fantastic quality to it. This time it was really good putting him together with Tina as well, so it was good man. I’ll always come back to these people because they’re friends, and they just sound great.
Of course it’s not as if your album is the only thing you’ve been doing either. Can you tell us a little about the other musical ventures you’ve been involved in lately?
It’s been a bit crazy really. Last year I did a lot of orchestral work with the British Symphonia and we sold out the Royal Festival Hall. I’ve been working a lot more with orchestras, which I really enjoy. So I’ve been doing a lot of film score work and even some Hollywood stuff now with Mira Nair. I’m doing her next film score, which is really good because I love her stuff. You know she did Vanity Fair and Monsoon Wedding, and some other great films, so I’m quite excited about doing this score. But on top of that, I’m just working with an Indian movie from 1929. It’s a silent movie that I’ve done a film score for, and we’re using part of that as a video for one of the tracks, for Coil. But on top of that I’m probably working on a Brian Epstein musical on Broadway, doing more touring with orchestras at the end of the year – and we’ve got the album tour coming up of course. I’m collaborating with Akhu Khan the dancer to put together a show, so loads of things really, its cool.
Your album crosses so many supposed musical boundaries that it almost becomes a genre in itself. When you sit down to write a song, do you have in your mind, ‘oh, I want to write a ballad today, or maybe a drum and bass track’. Presumably at some point you have to judge how to balance the whole album together?
At the beginning I think through the arc of the whole album and how I want it to flow. Then I will think about who I want to collaborate with, or how I’m doing things, and I will think through how I’m going to capture the emotions. Probably like a novelist with a book I mean you have to plan it out a bit beforehand and then it just flows. It’s not so contrived or planned but at the same time you have to have some idea of what you are aiming for, and I think that is what I really enjoy: really trying to create something that has a complete flow to it. I think I’ve got more into that since I’ve been DJing a lot more. Last year I was DJing across America and we did the Hollywood bowl, and I DJayed across India as well. It’s been cool putting together the Fabric compilation. All that stuff really helps me to think about flow, and I think that working with orchestras really helps me also to think about harmony and structure in individual songs as well, so it is all good experience.
If you could work with any musician or singer, either living or dead, who would it be?
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He was an absolute genius. Probably because he was the most versatile singer I’ve ever heard. I mean he was somebody whose voice was just pure emotion, so it completely transcended any linguistic barrier or anything like that. He really put passion into every single note every time he sung anything. It was inspired and deeply spiritual, and I think that is something that very few singers could ever say. One of the next people I would like to work with would be someone like Jeff Buckley, but perhaps Jeff would turn round and say that his favourite was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, so I’d probably have to stand in line.
It’s clear that you’re a very industrious person and inspired. If for some reason you hadn’t become a musician, is there anything else you can conceive you might be doing?
I’d have to say comedian, because I used to work on Goodness Gracious Me. It was quite mad the other day because the ‘let’s go for an English’ sketch I was in, was voted the sixth best sketch of all time. It was quite surreal, as I contributed to writing that as well. But I think I would have left comedy anyway. I literally did that for a laugh with some mates and I was a bit shocked when it started getting so popular. I think definitely I’d be into writing, because I’ve actually just written a play for the National as well, which I may be directing sometime next year. I really enjoying writing a lot, but if not that then probably art. I like drawing a lot and I love painting, so I probably would have done something creative, I just don’t know what.
The amount you’ve achieved is, frankly, quite staggering. Do you feel your goal now is just to continue in that vein, to continue making great music, or are there other tangible goals you still hope to reach?
Thanks very much. I think personally I want to try and create new vocabularies and new ways of working, and also I love doing educational work. But I really want to create new sounds and new ways of expressing ideas, especially mixing in some of the really old traditional Indian classical techniques. Some of those just still haven’t been heard, and they are very exciting ways to compose new orchestral pieces. So I’d like to take them into a Hollywood film, and actually use some of the most ancient classical techniques to create a really big orchestral score, but actually not make it sound at all Indian. Just use it in terms of how I structure a piece. It’s quite exciting for me because I know where it is coming from, but other people might just think it’s an exciting piece of orchestral music.
Can you explain a little about how you were exposed to music growing up? When did you pick up your first instrument, and how do think your childhood led you towards the breadth of the music you make today?
I started playing the piano when I was about five years old. I was playing classical piano and got into jazz piano later on. I used to play with a youth orchestra when I was about eleven years old and then I got into playing flamenco guitar. I studied that for a bit, then Indian classical tabla, so I’ve studied a lot of types of instruments. I used to play with every band that I could, you know from Punk bands to Rock bands, to funk to jazz to whatever. I was constantly just playing, so I just grew up completely nuts about music. Then after that I just got into production and making all those sounds fit together, so that’s what led to the albums really. I think probably I was also listening to a lot of diverse music when I grew up. I was listening to everything from Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, to Indian classical music, to Led Zepplin and The Doors, and all kinds of things. Pink Floyd and then The Jam, and then the whole punk thing…loads of different types of music really.
Today of course it’s the Pope’s funeral in Rome. Do you have any particular thoughts on this you’d like to share? Perhaps in particular about how this is a religious experience being delivered to most of us through the media…
It is interesting in lots of different ways. One is that it is good to see the idea of a gathering place, where people coming together, and grieving over someone who they were saying was a humanitarian, but at the same time I have a problem with hierarchical organised religions. I think spirituality should be a personal thing, but then the whole pilgrimage thing seems to be a media circus right now. I don’t get how it is about the individual anymore. It’s become about something else, and there is a lot of hypocrisy, you know George Bush sitting there when he’s got the kind of history that he has, and his family has. I find it really bizarre as personally I don’t really see anything spiritual about those people, but that is just my personal view.
To some extent your music is political, but it feels as if that is the natural by-product of your philosophical outlook. As in, you’re a creative person, and you draw your influences from the world around you, so to some extent it will always be political. How important do you feel music is in general for keeping the world in perspective?
I think it is essential to keep the world in perspective. I think that music is the best platform to do that. Music is incorruptible. Music is about humanity. Everything else is so polarised or politicised by the kind of madness that is going on with the American Government, and all the corruption that is going on across Europe with politicians. So I feel that you have to force out a statement for the human being, and I think that music is a real place of balance. You can hear if someone is lying to you through music. You can hear if someone is being genuine because it is a language of the soul. It’s a language of emotion. Whereas when people use words, they can quite easily manipulate people’s thinking, and that’s what politicians do, so I think that music is a great way forward. People have used it time and time again, and you only have to look at how important it was in South Africa to a lot of musicians who protested against apartheid, or look at people like John Lennon, you know it goes on. The way people state their identity from Public Enemy to James Brown to people in the civil rights movement…I think music has always played an essential part in actually exposing the hypocrisy of politicians.
Well thanks for your time Nitin, that was really great. Best of luck with your many future ventures, and in the meantime we’ll be looking forward to the new album.
Thanks, no problem.
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