For the past 18 years, Young The Giant have been pushing boundaries and crossing cultural lines with their music.
Formed in 2004, the group has a penchant for serving up danceable tunes while tackling issues relating to immigration and politics in their recordings, earning legions of fans in the process.
On their latest album ‘American Bollywood’, the five-piece, led by American-Indian frontman Sameer Gadhia, lean on ancient Indian mythology for a collection that explores the human condition via the lens of a time gone by.
Discussing the meaning behind their latest release – which incorporates elements of alt-rock and indie-pop – the singer-songwriter opens up on the project and discusses his drive to blend Eastern and Western culture for a mainstream audience.
‘American Bollywood’ is different to anything you’ve done before. The album has been released in four ‘Acts’ – what can you tell us about it?
The album is a four part series; it’s told in four acts and it loosely mirrors an ancient Indian mythology called the Mahabharata. It’s ‘Origins’, ‘Exile’, ‘Battle’, and ‘Denouement’.
I was inspired to do it because I really learned a lot of this mythology through comic books, and it was an oddly Western thing that connected me to this ancient mythology. I love the idea of serialising the stuff and really wanting to know what’s gonna happen next.
This record has taken three and half years to make, and there’s so many sounds on it, I want everyone to appreciate each moment, each movement, for its own thing. It means a lot in terms of the mythology – and I think it’s a universal concept, we all have our stories…
Our ‘Origin’ story, the person that we are, has a lot to do with the generations before us and our family. ‘Exile’ is that decision to leap – a leap of faith – and find the thing that you believe in, or find a new place to belong. The Battle is to fight for your identity and fight for a place and belonging, which the world is doing right now. And the ‘Denouement’ is the takeaway.
There’s a lot of mythology that’s kind of binary, about good and evil, and the takeaway of this is that there is no good and evil. We’ve been set up to believe that there are protagonists and antagonists, but at the end you realise there’s good and evil in everyone and everything.
This isn’t just a concept album; it’s a linear narrative told across the 16 tracks. How did you find writing in that way?
There are many different types of lyricists and I can do the diary writing, but I’ve always been a person who likes to be the fly on the wall and telling the story. We’re observing the story, and while there are some very personal moments on this record where I’ve really pushed myself to be as vulnerable as possible, I’m excited by the concept of a higher story architecture.
As a band of five people, it’s actually much easier to create this architecture – like a house, or a memory palace – that you can live in together and contribute to together. Because otherwise, if you have five people trying to work on something and there’s no end goal or basic architecture, it’s much harder to get inspired and work through.
So in some ways, this was easier than ever…
You talk about a ‘fly on the wall’ style of writing and there’s plenty to draw inspiration from in the world today. Was there anything specifically that you found yourself revisiting in your lyrics?
I think Covid was all of our exile; it was our exile from our lives, the lives that we thought we were privileged to, and we became strangers of our own lives and were banished from it and forced to examine it. For me, that was most definitely the case.
I had two children over the course of this time, and I realised that it had been over 10 years since I’d been home longer than two or three months at a time. I’d really become a stranger to myself and the person that I was, and I really started thinking about who I was as a person, a husband, a friend, and a father. And as a musician, a writer, a creator, and a storyteller…
I wanted what I said next to be bold, and I wanted to have it be a new narrative and not rely on something old. So it was truly the inspiration of having that moment of that exile.
We’d written a whole other record, probably about 100 songs, and then I had this concept for ‘American Bollywood’. I brought it to the guys and they were so excited about it, so we just started from scratch again and wrote another 100 songs. That’s why it’s taken this long.
What’s great about this album is the incorporation of your Indian heritage throughout the music. Was that quite significant for you?
One thing that I’m trying to do with this record – obviously, it is this Indian epic, and it is this multi-generational story of the immigrant and belonging. But what we really wanted to do was bridge the gap of South Asian influence in Western music over the decades
Even the beginnings of some surf rock and psychedelia, you know, ‘The Beatles in India’ was a huge genesis of modern pop music. The first time that sitar was used in Western recording was Norwegian Wood.
Tracing the evolution of these very conscious musical choices that was like, ‘OK, that’s clearly Indian,’ to like more subtle parts and drones, lyrical matter being spiritual, and the whole hippie movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s being so closely tied to Indian spiritualism, Hinduism, Buddhism…
Even Nirvana is a Buddhist concept, and grunge music and the scales, so I do believe there’s a lot of representation of Indian sounds in Western music, but it’s become so ingrained into what we think of Western music to be that we don’t even really think about it.
As you say, over time certain sounds become normalised as Western when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Is it appropriation, do you think?
It isn’t appropriation. I think it started with a level of respect, and I think there’s always a fine line between appropriation and music being a fusion of culture and sound.
But I do think that [‘American Bollywood’] is a reappropriation of sound and, even with the mythology, these brothers are coming back to reclaim their right to the throne. I want to reclaim the sounds and remind people…
‘American Bollywood’ is out now on Jungle Youth Records.
Read the full interview in the December 2022 edition of Retro Pop, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
