Interview: Luke Sital-Singh
Luke Sital-Singh is a London based singer/songwriter. I first came across him in 2012 after hearing his track "Bottled Up Tight" playing somewhere and before the likes of Shazam I had to scrawl down any words I could catch. Now after all these years, several EPs and one debut record later, Luke's about to start his solo UK/EU tour tomorrow and release his sophomore on Friday the 12th of May. Luckily I was able to catch up with him last week for a chat...
For someone who’s
been making music since they were around 8 years old – what’s kept you pushing
along with your dream so far?
Um, it’s weird, I guess it comes with anything that you’re
good at doing. I mean it only got- I’ve been kind of musical for a long time
but I suppose it’s changed. In that time it’s like developed into something
actually sustainable and kind of doable. It’s only been in the last 7, 8 or 9
years that it’s really felt like something I could actually do for a job or
like, I’ve only been doing it actually to pay bills and stuff for 5 years or
something like that so it’s kind of progressed quite a long time. You know it’s
just something that I enjoy doing, and when you find something that you enjoy
doing and that you’re quite good at doing, and that you can make enough money
from, it’s kind of a bit of a no-brainer isn’t it really? [laughs] It just becomes something you do, and as a career it
changes a lot. It’s not a boring job that’s for sure, sometimes I wish it was a
little bit more boring because it is kind of fairly stressful and um, just like
all over the place in terms of the lifestyle but at least it keeps you busy and
on your toes. I’ve not gotten bored of it; it’s still a pretty fun thing to do.
Given that it’s been
so all over the place in terms of the schedule, is there any point in your
career where you’ve thought about going corporate?
Yeah loads of times, I mean I’m a bit of a pessimistic
person really and I often- on the bad days can get really down on everything
which is not a great trait because you start to be like “ah I just want to get a job in a bank” or like “I just want a paycheque” like an actual
monthly- y’know just to be able to count on some money coming in more
regularly. But then you speak to someone and it’s like nothing’s ever a given
really – anyone can lose their job at any point. I have to sometimes just punch
myself over the head and be like “Mate,
you’re doing it! You’re doing this thing that you’ve always wanted to do!
There’s tonnes of people that would love to be in your position so like, just
enjoy it.” I mean that’s only on my really kind of bad days, most of the
time I just know that there wouldn’t be anything that I could do that I would
enjoy as much and I would regret it instantly if I was to give up and get some
boring job. It would be an instant “what
have I done?!” kind of thing, so yeah it’s only on the really bad times
that I question the whole thing.
Around this time
about 5 years ago, you hadn’t yet been on your own tour. Obviously now you’ve
got your own UK tour coming up next week, and have been touring since. Is there
anything about life on the road that’s shocked you or that you hadn’t expected
to see prior?
Um… it’s a lot less fun than I thought [laughs] it’s a lot less like exciting. I think I thought that the
day-to-day travelling stuff would be more exotic and fun and exciting. The
thing is, partly because of my set up in terms of being a solo artist; I don’t
really tour with a band so you don’t really have a group of mates that you’re
hanging out with. It’s usually just me and like the tour manager. But even when
I have done a couple of tours with a
band it’s kind of just like “oh! I
thought touring was going to be amazing but I’m just eating Ginsters Pasties
from another petrol station and not getting much sleep”, but then you do
the gig and everything’s amazing! You think “this is the best job in the world!” I guess I wasn’t prepared for
the ups and downs of a tour, because you do go from super elation, adrenaline
rush of the gig to getting back in the crappy van and driving to a Travelodge and
then waking up the next day in some crap Travelodge and you’re like “ughhh”. So yeah, it’s very contrasting
in that way.
And so if you did have an unlimited budget for a show,
but you could only perform three of your songs – which songs would you choose
and how would you perform them?
Oh wow! Um, that’s a really good question! I would do- well
there’s one song on my first album called “Nearly Morning” which is on the
album in one way but there’s another version of that song. On the album it’s
fairly subdued like guitar-y, piano-y kind of nice harmonies but yeah it’s
fairly sad. There’s another version that we did, when we were recording it we
wanted to do something different and it was like proper epic, crazy, stadium
anthem, choirs, like massive, bombastic performance! But the label said that it
was annoying [laughs] and it’s not out
there but it’s on my hardrive and I’ve always been like “One day, when I have a 10 piece band, and an orchestra, and all that,
I’ll play this song, the way that we intended it to be on the album”.
That’s number one.
Um, weirdly there are some songs that I would still play on
my own. Maybe with- there’s a song called “I Have Been A Fire”
which I love performing, and I would play it solo but there’s a point where
like it explodes, and I would definitely have like fire and pyrotechnics going
and just exploding on the stage – 100%. Then there’s also one song on this new
album – Time Is A Riddle – called
“Nowhere Is Home” and at the end, on the album version it explodes into this
heavy rock outro type thing, so like a somewhat Radiohead influenced outro, and
I think I would just love to have a band for that one bit. They can just be
there for that one tiny bit of that song, which would be a massive waste of
money but they would all appear from underneath the ground or something. And
one other! The last song on the album is called “Slow Down” and at the end it’s
like imploding and it’s all this distortion and it goes all crazy. It’s a very
Sigur Ros type song, and I would probably just pay them lots of money just to
come on stage and it would turn into like a big Sigur Ros gig at the end.
As much as your music
sparks emotions in people, be it melancholia or even optimism; what are you
hoping will shine through the most on this upcoming album?
Um, I don’t know, it’s tricky. I don’t think about that too
much. I think for me, when I listen to music I like to feel like I’ve been
understood and to feel like I’m not alone and there’s somebody else going
through the same kind of questions and the same kind of- exploring life in a
deeper way or exploring what it means to be alive. That’s why I listen to music
and my favourite artists instil that in me… so I would like that really! Just for people to feel
like there’s been a space for them to feel things and to feel like it’s okay to
feel those things, whatever it is- it’s okay to feel y’know mostly sad with my music. We’re all on the same journey
really, just trying to figure out what the heck to do with our lives. I think
that this album is probably more confused than the first one in terms of
whether there’s one message saying “it’s
going to be alright” (like the first one) but this album is more saying “is it? I don’t know” [laughs]. But yeah I’d still want people
to feel understood.
And seeing as you
said that this album is a little bit more confused than the first; do you feel
like your writing style has changed in that same way or do you feel like you
still write very similarly to how you always have?
I definitely, on this album, thought about it less. I tend
to overthink in general life and on the first album everything was very thought
out and I had to know what I was talking about and I had to know what
everything meant, what every line meant,
and with this album I’ve dropped that a lot and I just wanted to let the
subconscious speak and trust that there was stuff to be said that I didn’t
quite understand. So there’s one song on here that came to me in a dream and
that’s something that I’ve always found sort of suspicious when people would
say that like “oh, this song came to me
in a dream” and I’m like “yeah, yeah
‘course it did”, but I genuinely woke up singing the chorus and this is the
song “Rough Diamond Falls” like track four. Yeah, I experienced this place
which was like heaven and hell mixed together and then the chorus melody and
words were just ringing in my head when I woke up and I just wrote the song and
that’s never happened before. There’s lots of things like that where I’ve just
tried to let things flow and just react to it in that way and so in some ways that’s
probably why it’s a bit more confused, because I wasn’t trying to find the
answers to what was coming out. I wasn’t trying to kind of round it all up and
summarise what my mind was trying to say.
After listening to
your Film Songs record quite recently,
I was wondering, if you had the chance to work on any film soundtrack of your
choice which would you pick and why?
I would happily score a Wes Anderson film but using songs
mostly, and it would be a really depressing Wes Anderson film, I would happily do
that. Um, to be really geeky about it, any Star Wars- like any John Williams
soundtrack really, I’m a big Star Wars geek. What’s amazing about the new Star
Wars film- we’re probably going to die before they stop making Star Wars films
and that gives you all the options. I mean it’s a long shot that someone would
ask me to score a Star Wars film – how cool would that be?! They’d be a crazy
person [laughs] I don’t know why
anyone would listen to my music and go “Hey!
You can score a Star Wars film!” [laughs]They’d
be a crazy person but I’d still say yes.
I would love to write songs for anything
really – it’s something I’d need to be interested in doing but I never
really write songs from a brief like when you write songs for films. I think I
would struggle to do that but it would be fun! I’d definitely like to do
something like that.
You’ve had quite an
eclectic music taste over the years listening to firstly grunge music and then
delving into more alternative music such as Damien Rice and Bon Iver. What kind
of music have you been listening to lately and in the lead up to the album?
Um, there’s a load of great albums coming out at the moment!
I’ve been listening to Feist’s new album Pleasure.
When I was writing the album I was listening to her second album Metals so that was a bit of an influence
on how I wanted it- it didn’t end up sounding anything like Feist but there was
something about that record that inspired me when I was writing. I’m listening
to a lot of Spoon albums, which is a bit more Indie/Rock band type thing which
I’ve been getting into more and more. My music taste recently and I guess like
over the last 10 years, has been fairly Singer/Songwriter-centric and I’ve been
listening to more bands, and like the new War On Drugs single is great. I’ve
been trying to delve into Ryan Adams’ stuff – he’s just released loads of his
b-sides from his new album, it’s like 17 b-sides, so yeah those are the few
things that I’m listening to at the moment.
