Singer-Songwriter Rounak Maiti Talks About The Recording Process Of His New Single “Interrupt Me"
The last time we spoke with Rounak Maiti, was after his three-piece-LA-based band, Small Forward, released their self-titled debut album in May 2020 during the peak of the lockdown. Since then, the ‘house arrest’ syndrome of the pandemic has significantly dwindled and an entire year has almost gotten over, to the point where the seasons have begun to repeat themselves once again. Maiti, who released a single, two years after his 2019 album Waiting On The Comedown, speaks of the new year as a gateway to a fresh beginning, as he says,” This feels like a very good time to start putting things out again, you know, with the new year and everything, it kinda feels like a new trajectory, like it’s indicative of the next chapter or something, for me. ”
Besides writing, composing, and partly producing the song, Maiti for the first time in his life also directed a music video along with his friend Illesha Khandalwal. With great excitement, he spoke of his experience by saying,” We started working on it in August last year, so yeah, it was probably the best thing to come out of the lockdown for me”, he joked, then continued, “ My friend Khandalwal and I basically wrote the story, and we picked the actors who were our friends, and we like essentially directed it ”. The video follows two boys playfully chasing each other around the vague roads of Goa, Maiti adds, ”I didn’t want to make something that was in Mumbai or Delhi or something because while I was going around scouting for places, I couldn’t find a place that didn’t look like Bombay or Delhi, you know like, when you see a railway station platform, you know you’re in Bombay ”. At the end of the video, one of the boys ties a blindfold around the other, hinting at there being more than just an innocent friendship between the two characters. Maiti, lets out a laugh, as he spoke of his experimentation with such homosexual themes in the video by adding, “ I wanted to push it into sort of a homo-erotic place but not explicitly, like the thing with touching, like I didn’t want there to ever be like a friendly touch, where it’s like oh he like puts his arm around him or something because that’s like very on the nose ”
The music video was entirely shot and edited by Grant Davis, who is a filmmaker based in goa. Maiti seemed to be in awe of Bach’s work and couldn’t stop praising his skills with the camera, he spoke highly of him saying,” A lot of his work I have admired for a really long time, like, I’ve followed him on Instagram for like 2 years, cause he’s made a lot of documentaries, other music videos, short films, and experimental films that I’ve really liked ”
Part of the reason why this track matters so much to him is that Interrupt me has been in the making for 3 years now. Maiti recalls,” It’s a very old song, I actually wrote this song in like November-December’17. My roommates from that time remember this track” Also, the fact that it’s a lot different than anything he’s ever done in the past, makes it a much more personal record, he explains,” it is definitely aggressive, I think a lot of it came out of like frustration and anxiety and that’s just kind of reflective of how my entire musical process is. In a way, the making of the music is the therapy, which helps me deal with the annoyance.”
While most of the recording was done singlehandedly at his house, in his bedroom, the drums were recorded at RnB studios in Andheri. Maiti has collaborated with a bunch of interesting people to make the entirety of this massive project come true. With Davis behind the camera and Khandelwal helping him with direction, he also had Ashrey Goel and Robin Schmidt, who were responsible for the mixing and the mastering of the single respectively.
One can check out the music video below: