Anoushka Shankar's Personal Best
Having completed her ambitious Chapters trilogy with new mini-album We Return to Light, Alan Pedder finds Anoushka Shankar in a nostalgic mood as she looks back on three decades of music and five of her favourite songs.
Anoushka Shankar is used to giving life her all.
Since making her gutsy live debut as a sitarist three decades ago, aged 13, performing to a New Delhi concert hall packed with 2000 devotees of her father Ravi, she’s charted an extraordinary path of her own as a singularly talented and frequently surprising musician.
Her feet-finding early years gifted us two albums largely based on Indian classical ragas adapted for her by her dad, but it was her third album, 2005’s Rise, that saw her raw talent suddenly bloom into a more progressive space with its use of unexpected textures and electronic drums. From there she turned genre-defying collaborations into a sort of signature, working with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Sting, Lenny Kravitz, M.I.A., actor Vanessa Redgrave – and, of course, her half-sister Norah Jones – over the next 15 years, from 2007’s Breathing Underwater through to 2020’s Love Letters, and more recently with Jacob Collier and Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith.
With the 30-year anniversary of that night in New Delhi just gone, Shankar recently took herself out for a solo lunch to celebrate all that’s come to pass since, posting on Instagram about the surreality of the moment and admitting to feeling more than a little nostalgic – exactly the mood we like our Personal Best interviewees to be in, so our conversation just a few days later was perfectly timed.
Admittedly, it was also entirely coincidental. The main impetus for the chat was this month’s release of We Return to Light, the third and final instalment of her Chapters project, a typically ambitious endeavour that produced some of her most potent and experimental compositions yet – like recent single “Hiraeth”, co-created with percussionist Sarathy Korwar and composer and sarod player Alam Khan. Other key collaborators on the two previous chapters include Arooj Aftab (who co-wrote the stunning “Stolen Moments”) and Nils Frahm, whose LEITER label has been Shankar’s home since 2022.
The origin story of Chapters is that the idea came to her while sitting at a café, making notes in her diary, on the first day of a fresh new year. “Three chapters, three geographies,” she apparently wrote, which makes for good press release copy but is it really true? “It really did happen like that!” she says, laughing. “I had been kind of stuck for ideas for a period of time, and then this thought started to flow and take shape really organically.”
The geography aspect was, she explains, inspired by a long-overdue return to Goa, a place that had meant so much to her in her twenties and teens. The changing of the calendar year is always a time for reflection, and being back in the Arabian sea state only amplified that feeling. “It really got me thinking about how places influence us, and how it felt to be back there as quite a different person,” she says.
While the geographies aspect manifested as recording each mini-album in a different studio – taking her to Berlin, London, and Los Angeles – the project quite quickly became thematically more about a journey than a destination. “There were different influences that came from being in those places, but the narrative of this emotional journey naturally took precedence,” she adds. “It’s a journey through pain or some kind of conflict and into a place of healing and resilience, and it just happened that I ended up symbolising it for myself through different times of day, which set the clock and the template for the music I was making.”
On the first chapter, 2023’s Forever, For Now, she took as her starting point a memory of a perfect summer afternoon in her garden at home in London, allowing that tender scene to cloud over, metaphorically, as the light began to fade. “I used an evening raga for the third track, ‘What Will We Remember?’, picturing the garden moving into sunset,” she says. “Then, in the second chapter [last year’s How Dark it is Before Dawn] I was really thinking of the nighttime as a period of regeneration, and how the darkness when we sleep is like being in a womb or a cocoon, or in the depths of the ocean.”
Using that symbology was what finally led her to the idea of healing, she says, with We Return to Light drawing on the release of daybreak and embracing the fullness of morning. “With the third chapter, I had this image of a really vivid, almost aggressively bright sunlight, like being on a Goan beach, rather than a more tepid yellow,” she explains. “It’s like you’ve come out of the pain and into a place of strength.”
It's of course tempting to draw parallels with Shankar’s own trajectory in life, but the journey is really for anyone hoping to find their own new dawn (Goan beach not guaranteed). With the trilogy complete, she says she’s feeling happy and fulfilled. “Making an album feels great,” she says. “But having made these three chapters over two years, I get an extra feeling of satisfaction now that it’s done and it’s everything I hoped it would be.”
“I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to an ability to really encapsulate the now in my music,” she adds. “Closer to a kind of immediacy and honesty within the composing and recording process where the songs really do feel like they’re what I want to say right at that moment.”
When it came to choosing the five songs for her Personal Best, there was a slight miscommunication about the need for music videos to go with them. “I’m going to be very honest with you, I’ve only got a narrow pool to choose from,” she says, laughing. “But I’m lucky in that I feel like each of these songs hits a different point in my music making and I think they tell a nice story all together.”
"Lasya" by Anoushka Shankar (2013)
BEST FIT: Let's start with "Lasya", which is a track from your 2013 album Traces of You. What earns this song a spot on this list?
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: “Lasya” is one of those songs that’s kind of taken me by surprise over the years, in the sense that I feel like it’s become a little sleeper hit of mine over the past 10 years or so.
A lot of people have said that it’s their favourite track of mine, and it’s one of the songs that audiences call out as a request when I play live. Even though it wasn’t a single and it wasn’t really heavily promoted, it somehow has something that people seem to resonate with. So I guess I’m coming at it backwards, in a way, but I’m grateful for that because it’s interesting to be surprised by a song rather than having a song that you know from the beginning is going to be an important one.
One of the reasons I’m personally very fond of it is that it’s the first song I wrote with Manu Delago, who has become a very key collaborator for me since. He’s one of the focal instrumentalists on Traces of You, and then we worked together again, co-writing almost all the songs on a later album, Land of Gold (2016).
“Lasya” is a song we wrote together probably two or three years before it found a home on Traces of You, and that experience really set us on a co-writing journey and led to him being a part of my band for many years. It must have been around 2007 or 2008 when I’d first heard the Hang drum, or the Hang pan, and I always thought the resonance of it would sit really beautifully with the resonance of the sitar, so it really felt like a fulfilling moment to finally write for our two instruments,
The title is a word that refers to the dance of the Hindu goddess Parvati. It’s got this sort of gracefulness to counter Shiva’s tandava, which is like a dance of destruction that is meant to heal the world by ridding it of evil energies and so on. When we’d written the piece, I just felt like it had this really gentle lilt to it. It’s got a groove, but it never really picks up into a heavy, thumping space. It’s got this really gentle bounce all the way through, and it made me think of Parvati’s dance that I’d grown up hearing about, with all its feminine energy.
One of the main things on this album, for me, was working with Nitin Sawhney. We had been close friends for a long time before that, but I think working with him as a producer really helped to refine my thinking a little bit more when making an album. He tends to come at that process from more of a narrative place. Prior to that, when making an album I would maybe have had some overarching themes but be very adventurous and open-ended about how I conveyed them, but Nitin helped me start thinking a bit more conceptually about the journey that an album takes people on.
We used a lot of different instrumentation, but one of his key pieces of advice was to have just one vocalist as opposed to lots of guest singers. His thinking was that, whenever a voice does pop up, it feels consistent, and that consistency sort of harnesses the audience and brings them back to the themes. I had already reached out to Norah before I took that decision, and I ended up only working with her. All three of the vocal songs feature Norah, and I think that really helped to tie the album together. Also, it was beautiful to get to dig in a bit more deeply with her for the first time.
"Traces of You" by Anoushka Shankar & Norah Jones (2013)
BEST FIT: You’ve chosen one of those songs for your next pick, “Traces of You”, a track you co-wrote with Nitin and which ended up being the first single from the album. What’s special about this one for you?
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: I think it's just got a real sweetness to it. A lot of light, a lot of positivity.
The lyrics come from a poem I'd written that was quite a bit longer, in which I was really just trying to express a feeling of longing… for divinity, I guess, or some sort of spiritual connection, or whatever it may be. I was kind of writing towards that energy of feeling the essence of divinity everywhere, and I wanted to write it not as something like a prayer but more like a letter, which is a more intimate thing, and Nitin helped me to refine that.
The sitar you hear on the track was recorded in a single first take. I'd played it just to use as a reference for ideas, thinking I would go back and recompose it later. But by the time we’d recorded everything else we’d become so attached to that first take that we ended up keeping it. And then Norah came and sang.
As you know, our father passed away during the making of the album, and when it came out everyone kind of assumed that this song was about him. It’s funny, really, because the other two vocal songs on the album [“The Sun Won’t Set” and “Unsaid”] are more directly about him, whereas “Traces of You” speaks to something a bit broader.
Of course, because it’s quite broad, people can read into it in many different ways. It could be about loss or it could be romantic, or prayerful. It could be almost anything.
You and Norah had collaborated before this, but not in such a close-knit way. Do you think that having taken so long to work together like this made the experience somehow even sweeter?
I do, and it felt like the right time. I think we were both in a place of comfort and confidence in our own music-making, and it was nice that we worked on a few songs because we got to do things in different ways.
She sang on two songs that I’d co-written with Nitin – this song and “The Sun Won’t Set”, which I developed a little bit with her. The third song, “Unsaid”, she and I wrote together on the day before we went into the studio. I wrote the lyrics on a plane and she helped me to put it to music, so we got to experience writing together for the first time. It just felt very natural and organic at that point.
Right. I remember Norah saying that although you both come from quite different musical worlds and different inspirations, the two of you had an innate understanding of each other and the communication was so easy.
Yeah, and it’s a good comment because I think that sometimes, with this kind of music, the amount of effort involved can become sort of invisible. Which is the whole point, of course. It should feel natural and easy by the time other people get to listen to it. But in order for it to be easy, there’s usually a lot of work involved.
Norah is obviously an incredible musician and calls herself a serial collaborator, and I’m a serial collaborator too. I’ve been working across different traditions for so long that when I come to the point where I’m sitting with someone from another music tradition, I’m not just sitting there with my sitar and a classical understanding of music. I’m sitting there with all the experience of the different genres I’ve experimented with or at least had to understand a bit about, and an open mind about how to approach my instrument in a way that’s not the way I was taught.
So, yes, you can definitely sit with someone and be like "Wow, that was a really intuitive, natural moment," but I think it all really just comes from the depth of your experience up to that point.
With Norah’s involvement, and as the first single from the album, “Traces of You” got quite a lot of attention. What kind of journey did this song go on for you in terms of the way it was received?
It’s interesting, because now it really has a piece of my heart. My band and I will still play it every now and then, and it always feels really sweet. I like that it can take a lot of different shapes and iterations. It can be a beautiful instrumental piece, but it can also work with different kinds of singers, and I’ve had some perform it with me.
I did get a little sick of performing it after the album came out, and that’s because it’s one of those rare songs that we tend to play through in mostly the same way. A lot of my work has enough space to improvise or expand within the song, or at least change the song enough so that it doesn’t become too boring on a big, long tour. I wasn’t really used to the pop approach of just playing a song as it is. Now that it’s been years since that tour, though, playing it feels like a pleasure.
You recently went on Norah’s Playing Along podcast and revisted this song together. How was that experience for you?
It was gorgeous! I found it so interesting that I started playing it in the same bouncy way as the recording arrangement but she had a slightly more weighted tempo, so we ended up doing this unplanned, slightly more stripped down version. It brought out a poignancy that I'd never really heard in the song before.
It’s interesting because I've had a couple of people say to me that it felt like you could hear that we'd come back to that song a whole decade later, bringing a whole decade’s more experience to it. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it was definitely a different shade and it felt really beautiful.
"In Her Name" by Anoushka Shankar (2022)
BEST FIT: The original version of this song is also from the Traces of You album, but then you went back and reworked it a few years later, giving it a new title in the process. It’s been on quite a journey.
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: Right, so it was originally “In Jyoti’s Name”, because while I was working on Traces of You, and just five short days after my father passed away, there was an absolutely horrific gang rape and eventual murder of a woman named Jyoti Singh that happened in New Delhi and I think the whole world was shocked by.
As a woman, and as a survivor of abuse, I always really struggle when I hear stories like this from anywhere in the world. It really does bring up a lot of emotions. With this particular story, coming as it did so soon after my father’s passing, the two became somehow intertwined for me. Even though I didn’t know that poor woman and I had no direct connection to her, the grief somehow became so huge and so painful. I ended up putting that emotional response into an instrumental piece on the album, as a way of honouring her and other women like her, and survivors too.
Again, because the dates of those two events were so close, Jyoti’s horrific story is one that has stayed with me. I remember it every year, so as we were coming up to the tenth anniversary of my father’s passing in 2022 I was also aware of the tenth anniversary of her murder. It also coincided with there having been so many horrific global stories of sexual violence – so, so many – in the year or two before that, and I really felt enraged about it. How could we be coming up to the 10-year anniversary of a story that shocked the world, a story the whole world responded to saying ‘this has to change,’ and yet nothing had changed?
So, with “In Her Name”, I wanted to mark the anniversary as a kind of questioning point. I wanted to be more direct this time, and it didn’t feel like instrumental music was enough, so I reached out to my close friend, the incredible poet Nikita Gill. She is like a sister to me, and she writes on a lot of similar themes in her own work, so I asked if she would help me with the lyrics.
And, in this case, I feel like the collaboration very genuinely extended to the music video as well. I really feel like Mythili Prakash, the dancer in the video, was an equal collaborator on this, because of the way that she extended the story of the song into the visual space through her choreography and through her movement. I think it’s really, really powerful and important.
I think anger can be harnessed in a really powerful way when it’s anger against injustice. It’s so different from a destructive or unhealthy anger. When it’s kind of pure and appropriate, we need anger to propel us into the energy to try and say something important. My album Land of Gold had a lot of anger in it, because it was all kind of written in response to the ongoing humanitarian refugee crisis and there was some rage and energy that I wanted to express.
"Daydreaming" by Anoushka Shankar & Nils Frahm (2023)
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: When I first started the trilogy and kind of set the template for how I wanted to work, I said that I wanted to walk into each chapter with a blank slate and new collaborators and just allow myself to be in and create from that space.
“Daydreaming”, I would say, was probably the only exception to that, because it’s the only song that’s not fully original. It’s based on a beautiful Carnatic lullaby from the South Indian musical tradition, and it was something that I’d hear my mum and grandmother singing to me as a kid. Because of that, it’s a song that I’ve always loved. It’s rare that I hear it live, but if I do watch someone perform it, it’ll bring me to tears every time.
In the months leading up to the recording session, I had a kind of unusual late summer afternoon with my kids in the garden. I had my sitar with me, just playing really gentle music because one of them wasn’t well and was tired. Somehow my hands just found this melody and he fell asleep on my lap, and my other kid was there, and it felt like this distilled, perfect moment in the middle of all the crazy that goes on: the sunlight, the trees, the music, the kids.
That was really the imagery I wanted for Chapter I: Forever, For Now, in which thinking about transient moments in our lives like that one and how to sort of capture those and get back to them even in difficult times. We tried to recapture that moment in the music video too, which does actually feature the kids and my garden at home.
As I said earlier, I knew that I wanted the trilogy to be a journey through time. I imagined the end of the first chapter as still being in the summer garden but the day is drawing to a close, and then Chapter II kicks off right from that point and leads us into the nighttime. It’s titled How Dark it is Before Dawn just to remind us that even when it feels like life is endlessly dark or that thing are getting ever darker, the light does eventually come back.
At that point, the songs started moving out from a personal to a collective point of view. I was really conscious of things that were happening in the world and felt like we all needed a collective reminder of our need for pause and redirection.
BEST FIT: How did you find working with Arooj Aftab as a producer, and also with Nils Frahm who joined you on this song?
Well, Nils is an artist I’ve adored – and there’s no other word for it – for years. He’s been a really big influence on me. I love, love, love his work, so getting to play together on “Daydreaming” in this really sweet, tender way was just gorgeous. His piano part was improvised and it sounds so beautiful and so simple. He played with so much restraint and sweetness and left a lot of space for the lead melody.
With Arooj, I really credit her with the sound world and emotionality of the entirety of Chapter I. She was incredible to work with. She’s so good at taking a kind of minimalist approach to instrumentation, and her own music carries so much space. She has the confidence to really let a note linger, or to really step back and wait and allow the music to unfold, so I think having her there really centred that approach in my playing as well. I could just allow things to happen.
We finished the songs, for the most part, within a week despite having gone in with basically a blank slate. For me, that really set the template for what came after and solidified my faith that showing up for creativity means that creativity shows up for you. That if you just take the time to sit down, something wonderful can happen.
"New Dawn" by Anoushka Shankar (2024)
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: I’m really proud of this song, because I think it really tells the story that I wanted to tell. It also feels really fulfilling as an instrumentalist.
On Chapter II, I co-wrote with my producer and friend Peter Raeburn who, about 99% of the time, is more of a film composer. Like some of the other people I worked with on the trilogy, I feel like Peter thinks of music in a very different way than I do. His music is very visual. It’s very emotion led and narrative driven, and he really helped me to dig into the theme of healing.
With “New Dawn” being the last track, we wanted it to leave people with a lift rather than leaving them in the pause. When you hear this song, you know that you're coming out of it. You're coming out into something else. There's that first light of dawn. There's that first lick of rhythm and energy. After a whole chapter of almost rhythm-free music – a gentle pulse, but no drums or percussion – you get to finally start to feel a pulse and a beat.
I had so much fun with this as an instrumentalist, laying on tonnes and tonnes of parts using my pedal board and other equipment, and the layers just became so dense, so interlocked, and so fun. It feels incredible to play with the band.
It’s Peter’s partner who is the vocalist on this song, right?
Yes, Megan Wyler. She and Peter are two close friends of mine. She’s an incredible vocalist. She has this beautiful technique where she uses her voice more as a texture than as a lead feature, and she can really layer it up so that it sounds immense but still has the humanity of the voice in it, and I think that feels really special.
Although you worked with different collaborators over the course of making the trilogy, there was one person you worked with on all three chapters – Heba Kadry, the mastering engineer, who I think is one of the all-time greats.
Yes, thank you for picking that up! She’s just incredible.
It was interesting because we were really careful throughout the process of making the three albums – each in a different place with different studio engineers – to make sure that each chapter had its own identity, sound-wise, but would still work together as a trilogy. And, of course, the mastering is a big part of that. I think she achieved such a warm, full, glorious sound on it. We've worked together on a few albums before this, and I will have everything I do mastered by her until the day I die.
Chapter III: We Return to Light is out now on the LEITER label. Shankar is Guest Director for this year’s Brighton Festival in May and performs at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam in July.
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