On Museum, Tejas does the unexpected. “There’s not a single guitar on this EP, acoustic or electric,” the singer and songwriter says. Yet this synth-heavy effort retains his characteristic emotionally charged sound. And emotions certainly run deep on the four-song collection, which serves as a tribute to his father who passed away in 2021. Indeed, it’s a reflection on their often-troubled father-son relationship. It’s also, the artist says, a look at his own identity as somebody who grew up as an Indian immigrant in Dubai during the 1990s and early 2000s. As Tejas drew on his love of history, cinema and Shakespeare for Museum, he found multiple muses on a trip to Spain that included visits to several art galleries alongside stage productions of Hamlet and The Lion King. He also found great admiration for Mughal emperor Akbar, who is represented via the cover art designed by Nisha Vasudevan. While the overarching lyrical themes for the EP are loss and redemption, sonically Museum aims to bring forth an ‘Indianness’ through classical and folk elements courtesy of sarangi player Vanraj Shastri, Hindustani classical vocalist Aseem Trivedi and the use of the banjo-like bulbul tarang. Produced by Tejas and his long-time collaborators and live band members, drummer Jehangir Jehangir and bassist Adil Kurwa, Museum also serves as an introduction to a full-length album of the same name, scheduled for release in the second half of 2024. “I wanted to honour my dad [with this EP],” Tejas says. “It has been very important for me to recognise what stories I need to tell, like those of all the kids [like me] who grew up in the Gulf.” Below, Tejas tells Apple Music how each of the four songs on the EP came to be. “Exspiravit In Machina” “I wanted an introduction to the EP and one of the songs I was listening to a lot at the time was ‘Dunya Salam’ by Baaba Maal and 1 Giant Leap, which is like a beautiful call. I wanted something that sounded like that, so I decided to use some of sarangi player Vanraj Shastri’s takes from [the EP’s third track] ‘The Clock’ to set up what the rest of the sound is going to be like. When I perform live, we play with [pre-recorded] tracks and a lot of the songs are from previous albums that feature people who no longer play in the band, whether it’s Jishnu [Guha] or Mali. I’ve even had my mother’s voice on ‘Kindness’ [from 2017’s Make It Happen] and now my father’s voice is on this song. When we’re on stage, they’re all still part of the gig in a weird, spiritual way. It takes on a literal sense of the ‘Exspiravit In Machina’ or ‘ghost in the machine’ in that these people are preserved in digital formats.” “Museum” “This song started the album [project]. I started writing it in 2019. I just had the line, ‘Take me to the museum’, because I’m such a fan of museums. Then I wrote the song after everything that transpired with my father. It’s about redemption. I wanted to redeem my father in my eyes, not that he needs my approval or acknowledgement. The weird thing is that when people are alive, you only think about the most recent kind of interactions with them, like, ‘Oh, he’s being terrible with me’ or ‘This person’s behaving this way.’ If you’ve known them your entire life, obviously that’s not the only thing that they’ve meant to you. The moment my father died, I started thinking about his life as a whole and he was a wonderful father when I was a child. I would want for nothing—except, I suppose, emotional guidance. He was not that kind of guy. He was not going to give that.” “The Clock” “I love B-sides. I think of them as songs on which you can be weird or experimental. This song is not something I would usually put out, in the sense that the way that I’ve written it is very atypical of me. My songs are written [based off] the riff or the hook. This is a song where I just put down chords and wrote on top of that. It’s very much inspired by how I felt in the hospital, just as my father died. I had to just think about that moment. At least that was what I was feeling when I was playing these kinds of displaced chords.” “Read Your Mind” “What’s awesome about ‘Read Your Mind’ is that I sampled ‘Museum’ to make it. The bed of the song is the reverse of ‘Museum’; I took the music of the chorus, flipped that, and then looped the line in which the background vocalists—Aria Nanji, Mallika Barot and Shannon Donald—are singing, ‘And if I fall in love… would you open up and let me read your mind?’ I was looking to make a reprise, typical of Broadway [musicals]. It’s also [partially] inspired by The Beatles’ ‘The End’ which goes, ‘In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ Here, I sing: ‘In the end, is there something more?’ I was trying to make a final statement with this song.”