Before she danced and sang as the bold Ethel Muggs in Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies, Dot. (aka Aditi Saigal) was a student of music and creative writing at Bangor University in Wales. Back then, there were moments where she really just needed a piano and had no idea what her ‘sound’ really was. ‘Those days my life consisted of going to lectures, practicing and weekends in pubs. And of course there were the Tuesday open mics’.
‘After completing my undergrad in music, I kind of knew I wanted to do a Masters but I didn’t want to do it because usually there is only one for classical music and there’s no such thing as like a song writing Masters. I didn’t want to formalise the song writing process in that way but I did want to explore education a little further and I had always had an interest in alternative education because I went to an alternative education school set up. I was interested in the philosophy and the pedagogy; I decided to a research masters, which would give me some research skills. So then Archies came and changed the plan again. As you can guess, I’m a pretty erratic person’.
Aditi wrote her first jazz number when she hadn’t pulled out her salsa heels and gone out dancing for ages. There was a sudden spike in the views and shares of her videos online but she decided to take things slow. Sonically, Aditi’s voice and song-writing edge is unmissable. She has a very solid foundation set in jazz which she bounces off to jump onto other dimensions in music. ‘I had a jazz upbringing so my music naturally became like that. Now, working with other people has made things a lot more different for me. It is heading in a couple of different directions. I’ve started doing some more electronic stuff but the things are still born out of jazz.’ The result of this experiment is her latest work, Girls Night and Indigo.
NEW WORK
A lot of the songs from my early days came from very mundane things like little vignettes of life that I would observe. But then some songs, I wrote as an experiment—to accom- plish a particular thing musically or lyrically. For Girls Night, it started off as an exercise, of how many Indian guys names can I fit into a song. And then as I was writing the chorus, I thought about whose perspective is this from? And then it kind of occurred to me that the place that I talk about boys the most is with my friends and the song morphed into a different thing where it became about my best friends. We don’t do the cheesy things but we have amazing, intense, wonderful conversations about all kinds of stuff, including boys but boys just being one of them. And Indigo I did with Playbook Records. The song is about letting go of the ideas about what art is supposed to be and to just immerse yourself in the process of it.
CREATIVE PROCESS
Words and melody both come together to me. That’s been a standard feature in my writing. I never really see the lyrics as separate from melody, because I’m not just trying to fit the syllables into a pre-existing melody or try to write a melody according to the shape of the sentence. They come together when I’m noodling on the piano. The relationship between what’s being said and what’s being heard matters to me. My lyric writing has always been very important through the process. I’m very particular about where certain stresses need to fall. As for sound, I’m curious about a lot of different things and still navigating my way around the studio and figuring out what I like.
ON SET AND STAGE
I’m still finding my feet with acting, still very new to it. Archies in a way was quite an easy project to slip into just because of the fact that it was a musical and it made sense for me ‘coz I could sing and act, both together. But I’m interested in a lot of different things.When you’re a creative, ultimately all your life experiences meld into one and start borrowing from different things. I write out of my experiences. There’s some lines in my songs now that are coming from this whole experience of being an actor. It’s kind of seeping into my writing. I don’t think it’s difficult in terms of switching between set and stage because to me it becomes all the same.
SEA CREATURE ON THE SOFA
I’m going to put out my new EP very soon. It is called Sea Creature on the Sofa and started from a breakup that I had. I had already written a bunch of songs towards an album but wasn’t doing it. And then this breakup happened. Then I made two big decisions, which were one, to get a tattoo, which I did and the second was to finally start this album. An album where I don’t compromise on anything. No budget is a limit, no technique is a limit, no musicians, no nothing. I’m going to save up and create it. It is going to be a live album which takes a lot more planning. It is an old-school way of recording an album. I’m going to do whatever I want and get it done. That’s the plan.
Words Hansika Lohani
Date 02.11.2024