An Interview with Auyon Mukharji (Darlingside): Beauty in the Darkness
Darlingside’s new record, Extralife, begins with ominously beautiful, resigned lyrics: “It’s over now / The flag is sunk / The world has flattened out.” The whole album is beautiful and I highly encourage you to listen again and again. The quartet will open Newport on Friday and will set the tone for a weekend that promises to be full of hope while also not shying away from grim truths. We had the chance to talk with singer, violinist, and mandolin player Auyon Mukharji about his own shift into making music, the new record, and performing in iconic places.
RLR: I saw in an interview that you spent a year traveling after college, including four months in Ireland. Can you talk about that experience a bit and to what extent that has impacted your work with Darlingside?
AM: The biggest way that year impacted me was in making me feel comfortable pursuing music as a career path. That had previously not been a thing I’d entertained in a big way. I had a Watson Fellowship on self-expression in folk music, so I lucked out in a huge way. It’s a dream fellowship, where you get to do whatever you want.
I had started doing a little bit of songwriting in college. All four of us in the band had taken a songwriting course at different times during our winter studies term at Williams College. I got into songwriting at that point. I started playing the violin at a young age; my mom sort of corralled me into that, since she saw that I wasn’t terribly good at sports and was worried about my college resume. I started singing in high school and into college, but didn’t feel a real connection to music until I started songwriting, at which point it all kind of exploded. And I felt super fortunate that I had this training that I’d been sort of coerced into doing.
The first songs one writes in college are almost across-the-board quite bad songs, or at least I can say that about myself, but I loved it. I couldn’t get enough of it. So when I had the opportunity to put together a Watson proposal, that was the main thing I was excited about. And then when I won it, I got to roam around studying folk music in Ireland, Brazil, and Turkey. I grew up playing the violin, and the mandolin is the same strings [with frets], so I kind of designed it around mandolin-style instruments. I was studying the mandolin in Ireland and Brazil and in Turkey, I was studying a lute, called the saz (which is not really like a mandolin at all, but it was close enough for the fellowship).
Getting into music as the product of South Asian immigrants can be irksome or difficult to deal with for those parents. And so the Watson put me in a funny place where I was sort of out in the world doing something creative and weird, with the blessings of my parents, because the fellowship was a cool thing and something they thought was worthwhile. My parents weren’t even terribly controlling as South Asian parents go. But had I just said: “I majored Biology at Williams, where you just sent me; and I’m going into music,” that would have been a more problematic adjustment, I think. But the fellowship gave me the gumption, I think, because you’re not allowed to get a job and you can’t be in school, so you’re sort of off doing your thing. The lack of any structure—no one to give you grades, no one to tell you you’re doing a good job—was a really good thing for me. It was a huge privilege to have, but there were certainly rough spots.
With the band, what we’ve come to is the four of us writing together. [During that] year I was doing a lot of creative writing for the first time. I was keeping a blog that not many people were reading. But that activity of writing every week and telling stories of what had happened got me into the mindset that I could be a writer. I majored in science in college, so I didn’t have a lot of creative writing experience at all. So this sort of freed up that ability or let me realize that desire.
And I did practice the mandolin a lot. I came into it as sort of a violinist, faking mandolin, and I came out of it able to play a few tunes. But the most formative [aspects] were more psychological, in terms of the confidence to try writing, to try being in a band, to try being creative. And feeling OK giving up the South Asian immigrant parent dream of becoming a PhD, MD, engineer, that world of things.
RLR: It’s interesting to me that all four of you ended up taking that songwriting course. As you all write together, what does the language of that co-writing look like?
AM: I feel like the beneficiary of the other guys who took various creative writing and poetry writing courses; so between the four of us, there’s a healthy number of courses in writing work-shopping, so I have picked up some of those skills and that way of thinking from them. So it’s a pretty healthy open market of ideas. There are a lot of disagreements, and a lot of strongly-held opinions about things. It’s a super slow process.
When we started, all of us would individually write songs and bring them in, and we’d tweak them a little bit. What we’ve come to, I think in part because of the way we present songs, the way we sing them, oftentimes with four parts going for the bulk of a piece of music, it’s important for all of us to feel connected to it. So we all come in on the ground level with almost every song, which is a very cool thing.
RLR: So something else you talked about with the Watson fellowship was your relationship with your parents, as a child of South Asian immigrants. And musicians in general have to gauge success in really different ways. How does that play out for you and it is different for you and the other guys in the band?
AM: On the spectrum of parents in general, my parents are super supportive of stuff that my brothers and I want to try. My mom had some hesitation with me ditching the med school plan for music, but when she realized I was with four other dudes at the outset who were just as passionate as I was, she became our most aggressive supporter. She teaches Indian cooking classes in Kansas City and sells our discs at every one. Early on when we played Kansas City, she sold more CDs at that gig than we’d ever sold before. That was a long-held record.
So my parents are super supportive, and I’m very lucky, so I don’t feel like I have to have an alternate metric [for success]. And I think that’s family-dependent, and my parents happen to be supportive, which I appreciate. It was definitely more of a discussion getting into it, but I’m sure there are just as many white parents who would be just as disappointed with a child going into music. [Laughs]
My grandparents too: My grandfather’s a little senile at this point. He knows I’m in music, and wants to be supportive, but doesn’t quite know what’s happening. So he thinks I’m in a symphony and hopes that one day I’ll be a conductor. Which is not, even if you are a classical musician, a typical career path anyway. So it’s a gentle and happy support that’s also a little confused. But I’m fortunate not to have to feel differently about our success or failure from the other people in the band.
AM: I am only speaking for myself, because if you were to ask all of us, we would have differing opinions, and probably criticize each other. So know that what I’m saying might be devastatingly offensive to the other guys.
For me, this is a scary time and I mean that both in terms of where the world is, where the US is at, where politics are, and where I’m at, in my early-thirties, which is kind of a scary thing. There are a number of things sort of colliding.
But when you find little bits of beauty in darkness, I think it’s a different kind of beauty; it’s more poignant and can mean more, and can give you something to hold on. That certainly wasn’t what we were thinking when we were putting it together, but for me, that’s where some of the magic in the album comes from. There is darkness and there is hope and it’s sometimes surprising the places you can find that hope.
RLR: You’re playing a set at Newport and it’s paired with a performance at the Cambridge Folk Festival. How do you think about preparing for sets at places with a lot of history, like these two festivals?
AM: I’m really excited to be there. The music we perform when we’re playing live is definitively not improvised. There’s no riffing, no solos, so what makes a gig different from another is what we’re saying in between songs. So we try and be as real and authentic about how we interact. I know it’s going to be a really cool thing to be kicking off Newport Folk. I’m not coming into it with any preconceptions, but I introduce the band differently at every show. Outside of that, I know there’s going to be some cool energy. So I’m treating it like any other gig, knowing that every single one of our gigs feels a little different because of how we talk while we’re there. A lot of it is feeding off the energy that’s at a fest or in a room. And we had an awesome time at Cambridge a few years back, and when you get invited back to a festival, it feels like coming home.
RLR: Last question is a bit tongue in cheek. Langhorne Slim did this thing on twitter where he’d tweet a song title and just call it “best song ever”. And then, 20 minutes later there would be a different best song ever, and the next day another 2-3 best songs ever. And I loved it because it demolished the idea that there could be a best song ever while still having this joy about a song. So, with no explanation or qualification, or need to justify, and the knowledge that what you say now won’t be what you would say later, what’s the best song ever?
AM: Playing With the Boys, by Kenny Loggins.
Darlingside kicks off the festival on the Harbor Stage at 11:00 a.m. Friday! I can’t think of a better act to get things started this year. You can find more tour dates here – catch this band live the next chance you get!
Photo Credit: Cameron Gee