[Transcript]

Aaradhna – Don’t Go Back
By Aaron Hawkins
Photos by Karen Ishiguro

The First Lady of Dawn Raid got an early Christmas present this summer in the form of a six-album deal with Universal Republic, and a one way ticket to the United States to push the first of these, 2012’s Treble & Reverb. Speaking to Rip It Up early in the New Year, Aaradhna is still pinching herself.

In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt cut off her sleeping husband’s penis, took it for a drive and tossed it out the window of her car. News of this DIY castration reached playgrounds everywhere, and we winced as we crossed our prepubescent legs in solidarity with John Wayne Bobbitt’s severed parts. Over a decade later, at a screening of John Waters’ classic Pink Flamingos, the sound of sweet soul boy soprano Frankie Lymon became indelibly linked to the visage of Divine, an obese transvestite, stealing a raw steak by jamming it between her ample thighs and waddling out of the store with it. By recording a tune with the notorious spurned spouse as the title character, delivered in a croon that brought to mind the syrupy soul of the tragic child star, Aaradhna Patel had hit upon a big purple vein of visceral shorthand. While ‘Lorena Bobbitt‘ may have her tongue firmly in her cheek, it’s hard not to think how responses to the punchline may have differed had, say, Che-Fu come out with a song about sexually mutilating his girlfriend.

“Oh, yeah. But I didn’t think about that, eh. What it would be like if a guy said it. I dunno, at the time I thought it would be funny and I like crime stories and I thought it would be interesting to write about something I’d read about. Something different to what I actually write about, which is…” she laughs nervously, “…love. I guess I speak for all the angry girlfriends. All you gotta do is just mention her name, and you’re like ‘Hey, don’t mess with me!”

Aaradhna fires plenty of warning shots on the album, taking aim not just at wandering gents, but also philandering females (‘Bob’s Your Uncle’), sisters moving in on her turf (‘Miss Lovely”), late night fashion police (‘Cool Shoes’) and herself. “Wake up, wake u-u-u-up / Get up, get u-u-u-up / Get out of bed / Stop wasting time!” she demands over and again on ‘Wake Up’. As a child of the 1990s, it was hard for me to avoid thinking of Matt Bianco’s soft jazz song ‘Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed’, the theme from Kiwi kids’ show What Now during the glorious Si and Cath years. After I reluctantly sang a few bars of this to her, it became obvious that this was the first time Aaradhna had become aware of this song’s existence. The single ‘Wake Up’ is a letter from Aaradhna Patel the person to Aaradhna the artist, in an attempt to get her to snap out of a funk that had come to dominate her both creatively and personally.

“The depression started in early 2007, and I did go to the States to try and do my music stuff over there, but it didn’t work out and I came back in early 2008. I came back here, to my Mum’s house. This is the same room where I used to sleep every day, just sleep here every day, sleep, eat, drink… go out with the girls and then come back here and sleep, all day every day, ‘til like, mid-2009. Then I went to Romania. I was still feeling that whole depression state, you know. It wasn’t until a while later when I made a YouTube page and put all these snippets of a song I was writing on there, and people were commenting and stuff like that, asking me when I was going to come out with a new album. ‘That’s kind of when I wanted to do it again. So that was late 2009. I wrote ‘Wake Up’ here, in 2008, when I was going through it, but I still didn’t wake up to it!”

If the emotional depth of her lyrics took a big step forward in the years between albums, the musical backbone jumped back a generation or two. 2006’s ‘I Love You’ and 2008’s ‘Sweet Soul Music’ drew on the ‘90s R&B of her youth, but ‘Treble & Reverb’ climbs a bit further up the family tree to the music that inspired those very same artists Aaradhna grew up listening to. The time she took off from songwriting gave her the space to explore the genealogy of soul, but her trip down that particular rabbit hole was set off by another crate-digging throwback from the Universal Republic catalogue.

“You know Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black album? That was given to me as a birthday present at the end of 2006. That album I kept repeating every day while I was in the States. It was my favourite album of that time, and I just loved the style she was doing and it helped me embrace that old school sound too. After a while I started digging for all these old school artists and trying to gain more knowledge and, y’know, broaden my music. I‘ve always loved Sam Cooke, then I started to listen to more of Sam Cooke, more Otis Redding, then I started to listen to Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker and a whole lot of doo-wop groups.”

Frankie Lymon and Amy Winehouse are classic chapters in the history of tragic talents whose lives were cut too short, but Aaradhna doesn’t feel like she was finding any particular solace in their tortured souls during her own dark days. “1 think its coincidence. I just like the music that they make. I like to listen to people who are really honest about what they’re saying. Where you can really tell that they really mean what they say. Those are the kinds of artists that I like to listen to.”

Aradhna is the second artist from South Auckland’s Dawn Raid stable to sign to Universal Republic, following on from inking a deal for Savage back in 2008, making sweet synch money from the Seth Rogen film Knocked Up and becoming the first Samoan artist to have a #1 single in the USA thanks to college parties nationwide. His are broad footsteps to follow in. but the second time around Aaradhna expects the label to take a more measured approach.

“They’ve got more experience now — they know what not to do, they know what’s best. I know that [Dawn Raid co-founder] Andy Murnane was saying, they were so excited for Savage, and it was all a ‘Let’s get in there!’ rush, they were in a real rush, pushing things. But they know what’s to come now, so they’ll 1 let it flow naturally, instead of rushing.”

This is also her second stateside expedition, and her natural excitement has been tempered by her earlier endeavours – a tough four month period from late 2007 where her future was being carved out by an outfit trying to establish itself as an independent label. They had good intentions, she said, but just couldn’t pull it off.

“I was missing home, I got home sick, and then it was like, things weren’t working out… I just didn’t see what was happening. Every time a promise was made they were always broken. ‘We’re gonna put your music out on the shelves!‘ Didn’t happen. I just knew that it wasn’t going to happen so I went home. I’m really grateful [for the Universal Republic deal], but I know that anything can happen any day. That I could get dropped or whatever. I’ve always got one part of my brain saying – ‘Hey let’s not go too far out here!’ I keep my fact on the ground and keep doing what I love. All I know is that I’m gonna keep writing music and, whatever happens, happens.”

The confidence of her most recent material is inseparable from the confidence with which she went about the recording process. Because she doesn’t play any musical instruments with which to compose songs on, she is largely at the mercy of those recruited to help her put them together. Usually she will sing ideas at her brother, who will then repeat them back to her on his guitar and she will take it from there. If he can’t get it, she will manually manipulate notes in ‘Reason’ one by one to try and nail something down. This process, she says, can take forever, and earlier on didn’t always yield the fruit she was after.

“I would say most of those times would have been during my first album. There were certain ideas that I couldn’t translate to my producers, so it ended up sounding not exactly the way I had pictured it in my head. I was just too excited, l would say ‘OK, yep, this is the one!’ Nowadays I feel like it’s easier, I have all the technology that can help me put it down.”

This time around, though, she also had virtuosos on deck to help her through it. After labouring away on a guitar line for ‘Cry Like A Wolf’, she only had to hand it off to producer/engineer/multi-instrumentalist Evan Short to play for her, and when you’re plundering the aesthetic of soul singers and doo-wop bands, you could do far worse than the now NYC-based Pete ‘P-Money’ Wadams running the boards in the studio. After recording demos of all the songs on the album, mostly in her bedroom at her mum’s house, Patel, Wadams & Short hit the studio proper and banged out ‘Treble & Reverb’ over the month of November 2011.

“I definitely spoke my mind more this album. I didn’t wanna make the same mistake I did with the first album. I’m happy with [that album] but I should have spoken up… but I gotta live with it. With this album, I’m so proud of it because it’s exactly what I want.”

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‘Aaradhna – Don’t Look Back’ from Rip It Up No. 351, Feb-Mar 2013. Used with permission.