Jishnu Dasgupta of Swarathma and Nader Mansour of Wanton Bishops spoke to Iknoor Kaur about their recent collaborative single that releases today
Sixty hours, two hotel rooms, six musicians and a lot of energy drinks — that was all they had when lebanese garage blues rock band Wanton Bishops and Indian folk fusion band Swarathma managed to find mid-way and produce a first-time collaboration called lay It On Me. Surprisingly, the two had not even heard of each other till a few hours before they decided to collaborate, said Jishnu Dasgupta, bassist of Swarathma. “We were both in Kolkata for the NH7 Weekender when a few friends at Red Bull introduced us to Wanton Bishops and wanted us to collaborate with them. We had no clue about who they were and didn’t know what to expect. This uncertainty is what we loved and within a few hours we were sitting together and jamming,” he added.
According to Nader Mansour of Wanton Bishops, they said no to a lot of electro and pop artistes before they agreed to collaborate with Swarathma. He shared, “Personally I had been fascinated with Indian music, even before meeting Swarathma. I love the sound of sitar, tabla and the Indian violin and even the vocals. Thus, we were looking for such a sound in India to collaborate with. So when we got a list of artistes from Red Bull, we turned down a couple of electro bands because we were looking for an Indian sacred sound and Swarathma offered all of that — in a modern way but it was brilliant.”
The whole process of getting together, coming up with a song, producing and arranging it after recording it, took two and a half days and it was all done in Kolkata. “This is the hardest we have ever worked in our lives. For two musicians, who have never heard of each other before, to come together and agree on a song and concept both musically and lyrically is not simple. We worked through the night for over 48 hours at a stretch, converted a hotel room into a studio and spent the first night only figuring out what the song was going to be like. The next day Red Bull was keen on capturing the entire process, so we were caught up with cameras, giving interviews, talking about our experiences and impressions of each other. Then, being a Bengali, I took the Wanton Bishops duo, Eddy Ghossein and Nader, who had never heard of Kolkata, all around the city. We also jammed and shot a part of the music video in an old, traditional house of Kolkata on the second day,” elaborated Jishnu.
The song reflects two different voices, he added. “There is the voice of you relying on yourself as an individual — carrying your own worries forward — and then there is the aspect of you lending support or letting someone lay their troubles, concern and worries on you. So it’s a song about what happens when you share each other’s burdens,” explained Jishnu while Nader told us about the process of composition. “When we went there and met them, we both had our own musical contributions. Thus, we had to help each other out. That is what the song is about — to lay your burden on each other. lyrically it was much easier than we had thought. Musically it was tough. Once we agreed over a theme and a subject we came up with the lyrics. Indian way of writing lyrics is very poetic and ours is very bluesy and to-the-point. So they wrote the Bengali lyrics and we wrote the English ones. We both had our languages and we went ahead with that. The music was trickier and we had to sacrifice a bit of our own to supplement the other,” he said.
The song is the only single collaboration of the two and will release today on Red Bull’s official site.