Caution to the Wind

Among the fastest rising stars in the Indian independent music scene, singer-songwriter Mali—a.k.a. Maalavika Manoj—is the kind of artist who evolves with each subsequent release. Her debut album Caution to the Wind sees her progress from the breezy pop of her last collection, 2017’s Rush EP, to a more fully formed, well-rounded sound informed by her longstanding love for 1970s soft rock and 1980s new wave. Recorded with producer Arnob Bal, it features contributions from live band members–drummer Jehangir Jehangir, guitarist Apurv Isaac and bassist Stuart DaCosta—as well as frequent collaborators Tejas and Short Round. The album’s overarching theme of “powering through terrible times”, as heard on pre-release singles “Age of Limbo” and “Mundane”, has proven strangely prescient in a post-pandemic world. Even though she had finished writing all eight songs before India went into lockdown in mid-March 2020, she tells Apple Music: “The whole album is about living in the face of struggle. That’s something we’ve all had to learn how to do because there has been no escape from what we’re going through.” Here’s Mali’s track-by-track guide through Caution to the Wind, which we can confidently say is her finest work so far.


Live Again
“The earlier iteration of this song was akin to the Rush EP. It was, like, light and very band-ish. At some point, we scrapped that arrangement and redid it to have this darker synth and brooding sound, which brought out the meaning a lot better. I wrote it at a time when everyone around me was going through some personal struggle. There was this feeling, that at the end of the day only you can help yourself, which was circling the air around me. It was advice I was giving, that I was receiving myself. It’s about feeling out of sorts, feeling alone in a room full of people—moments like that. There’s definitely an element of struggling with mental health [referenced] in the song. And reinvention and rebirth.”


Absolute
“It’s about the feeling of helplessness. A collective expression of, ‘We can complain about the government and what’s going on around us all we want, but we’re complaining to an echo chamber, and as much as there are people who are angry about what’s happening, there are people who are equally happy about what’s happening, and that’s always going to exist.’ It was this moment of surrender. It’s a very passive-aggressive song. Arrangement-wise and compositionally, it’s almost uplifting, but lyrically it’s almost angry. The choir is a bunch of my friends, [singer-songwriters] Kamakshi Khanna, Ronit Sarkar, Mallika Barot, Aria Nanji, Joel Padikkal and Jishnu Guha [a.k.a. Short Round]. It’s always been a dream for me to record a choir in one of my songs and I felt the end of ‘Absolute’ was a good moment for it.”


Age of Limbo
“This was written after watching an episode of Conan Without Borders. There’s a part where he goes to the border of Israel and Syria and you can hear gunfire and bombs going off in the distance. That moment just stayed with me. It made me think that while we wake up and live our regular lives, people are waking up to violence every day. They don’t know if they’ll even make it to the end of the day. Then it just took on a whole new meaning with the lockdown, with people calling it a lockdown anthem and calling it a song of the times. I guess in a way it does have an open-ended feel. The writing of the song started on my keyboard. I was just messing around with the step sequencer, came up with this groove and played the first chords that came to mind. [What I played had] this really cool ‘Skyfall’ vibe, these very Bond theme-esque chord changes. I thought, ‘This is dark but in an uplifting way.’ Which is exactly the kind of thing that I like.”


Mundane
“It was written when I was 21, which is actually referenced in the lyric, ‘21 and the pressure’s on’. I wrote it during my gap year, which I never went back to college after. There were a lot of family weddings that I had to attend for some reason. It’s the worst thing to have to do when you’re taking a gap year. There’s a lot of answering questions like, ‘Oh, so what do you do? Why aren’t you in college? What kind of industry do you want to work in?’ And honestly, you don’t know the answers to those questions so it’s quite draining. You just know you don’t want to do something traditional. It’s about not wanting a mundane life. I initially composed the synth line on the piano. When we programmed it, we realised it had to be this nice ’80s-sounding synth line that was like a fun little motif. All of the synths on the song were played and composed by me, which was sort of a milestone for me.”


Cabaret
“It’s about the indie music scene, the whole live performance aspect of it. Sometimes it feels like you’re in a cabaret and you’re putting everything out for the world to see. You go up on stage and you’re performing to a bunch of people who are judging you, who are jaded and dismissive of the scene, who are like, ‘There is no good music coming out of India.’ I sometimes talk about how being an independent musician is living a silkworm kind of life where you just spin silk until you die by the very industry you’re in. There was this riff that I would play every time I picked up a guitar, much to the annoyance of my friends. I wanted this riff to be this incessant thing that goes on throughout the song, that comes in and out and does slightly different things.”


Horoscope
“This is the most saccharine song on the album. It’s cheesy in a way that it’s me speaking my heart out about something. Growing up in Chennai, [I’ve seen] things like astrology and numerology and horoscopes get thrown around a lot. My parents believe in them. My name has two ‘A’s for no reason. There are way too many ‘A’s in my name. It’s about the idea of determinism versus whether something is written. There are people who believe in things like horoscopes and people who don’t at all, and then there are a few like me who fall in between and question both sides. I’ve heard enough stories where people say that someone has predicted something and it’s been uncanny when exactly that happens, in a way that it’s not like they could have manifested that on their own. At the same time, you hear enough stories of people going and changing their names or choosing a certain stream and college because an astrologer said they should. Like, what even?”


Sitting on the Fence
“This was written at a time when I was dating a guy who was still a little hung up on his ex and it sometimes would bring up uncomfortable conversations. It’s a sort of make-up-your-mind song. The groove was entirely composed by me, which is something I’m really proud of, because I love the drums. I compose groove-first a lot. This is a 6/8 song, but I wanted it to sound nothing like a 6/8 song that exists out there. I sat with Arnob and played him five different 6/8 songs, like ‘When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going’ by Billy Ocean and ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ by Tears for Fears, and said, ‘Let’s listen to these references, and then throw all of it out the window and make a thing.’ I pieced something together, he heard it and said, ‘It’s great. Let’s make JJ [drummer Jehangir Jehangir] play it.’ JJ cursed me after it. It’s not an easy groove to nail live.”


Really? Not Really
“It’s the oldest song on the album. I wrote it in 2012 when I was going through the depths of depression. I was having issues with my friends. I was in college where I was a misfit. I was working on an EP that was going terribly. Even as recently as 2012, people would still be like, ‘Okay, yeah, I was depressed yesterday.’ Just, like, casually throwing that around without really knowing that it’s a state, it’s a condition, it’s something that’s prolonged over a period of time. So there was this feeling of, ‘Nobody’s going to understand what I’m going through.’ The song is me saying, ‘I can tell you what’s on my mind but you’re not going to get it.’ I initially wanted it to be completely acoustic, but the Mellotron was just asking to be in there.”