Hi Sooraj! Welcome to BuzzMusic! We adore the music video to "The Actor" over here; it perfectly captures the story of the song. Could you talk to us about how the video was created? Were there any influences on it? The video started off with the fact that I knew that it had to be set in Hollywood. It was a song written in and written about the "Hollywood life,” but I didn’t want it to follow a typical cliché. I like most of my music videos to have a definite script and story, and this was no exception. The director Jonas Gaida did an excellent job of bringing that vision to life. We shot the entire video in a day and kept refining the shots as we moved along - including putting in a little twist at the end! I’m also a pilot - and the opening shot of the Hollywood sign was shot from a small plane that I was flying. Your sound feels like the perfect combination of something that both The Beatles and John Mayer would do. Is this something that you tried to achieve, or did it come naturally? Is there anything specific about your influences that you try to breathe into your music? There’s no conscious decision per se to inject my influences into my music. It comes through very naturally. I’m a very audio-sensitive person - I learn through listening better than any other way. That way, most of what I listen to - including my biggest influences - get subconsciously entrenched into my playing and songwriting technique. We’re loving the storytelling of your lyrics! With its positive, honest messages and relatable themes, what is your thought process like when writing music? Do you try to relate them to your own life as it happens, or are you creating a story and writing to that? Every song is different. Sometimes I like to tell stories from the point of view of others. I take on the voice of characters and write from their perspective, but at the same time, draw from my own experiences and observations of the world around me. I love to just look around and observe.
Of course, I want to relate them to my own life as much as possible, but most of it is just observations and learnings, and I try to put most of that into my songs. I’m a huge fan of writing from the point of view of inanimate objects. I literally talk to inanimate objects and imagine the various stories and emotions that they could tell me. For example, “The Actor” spawned as a conversation in my head with one of the empty stars on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard! Knowing that you are a multi-instrumentalist, are there any instruments that you would like to learn to add to your music? Or do you have any goals that you are aiming to achieve? An instrument that I would love to learn is the saxophone! I love the sound of the saxophone so much - and it would fit in really well with my love for jazz and soul/R&B.
What can we expect to see next from you, Sooraj?
I’m in the process of shooting a few more music videos for some of the songs from my album “Here We Go.” And, of course, I’ve been continuing to write more songs!