Feeling & Making: An Interview with Anju Madhok
On healing, improvisation, and snickerdoodles.
If you know me at all, you’ve probably heard me gush about the illustrious singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, performer, and icon Anju. I’ve known and loved Anju for about a decade, ever since we were in the same a cappella group1 in college. Anju is one of the people who shaped me into the person and artist that I am today. I first interviewed Anju in 2017 for EMW Bookstore, a conversation that is both cringey and tender to revisit. Seven years later, I interviewed Anju again to learn about their creative journey and the process of making their forthcoming project.
Ally: In our last interview, we talked a lot about how EMW was a shared space that was really formative for both of us in our early artistic journeys. I would love to hear about how other spaces since then have nurtured and informed your work, other institutions or even just informal spaces you’ve created or found in your community.
Anju: Oh my gosh, this is already such a great question! You’re so good at the art of question asking. I feel like I’ve been healing from musical isolation in the past few years and there are a few spaces that have really supported that: one is this group called the Sounds of Liberation Collective. It was mostly jazz and creative music musicians. They were like big jazz people, women and nonbinary people working on changing jazz bro culture, and they were all in undergrad or grad school for jazz. I was just like, “Oh, I think you guys are cool, can I be part of this?” At the first meeting that we had, I cried because they were like, “We’re gonna improvise!” and I was like, “I don’t know how to improvise!” but then I learned how people do it through their support and trying new things. That place really opened me up musically. I also did a residency last summer in Western Mass at Antenna Cloud Farm, and that was also a big nurturing musical space. It was also mostly people who had formally studied music, but it was people of all ages, including our mentors who were in their 40s or 50s and who’d achieved industry success. The spirit of the music industry is so conquering-centric, to make it and rise up and beat out all these other people and get all these awards and whatnot, so the mentors and people who founded this were like actually, we just want to live a happy life in community and grow things in our garden. And I was like, oh yeah, actually that’s what I want too! I was taught to want all the conquering energy, like check all these things off and take over the world or whatever. But actually I just want to make music and have fun. Those places really opened me up and nurtured me and impacted me, but I’m still so grateful for EMW! Every time I pass by it, I’m like aww!
Ally: I know! That was definitely one of the spaces that made me in a lot of ways.
Anju: Yeah same! And you made me me too. Being with you in those spaces made me me.
Ally: Likewise! So our last interview was in 2017, which was seven years ago! I feel like I’ve witnessed a lot of huge changes in your life and your music, but what do you see as the biggest changes since then?
Anju: When you asked that question, I actually started thinking about all the ways I feel the same. Even though my life has changed a lot and I personally have changed a lot, I actually feel like musically, I’m still doing the same thing I’ve always been doing, which is feeling things and making things. That’s my motto on my Hinge bio. [Laughs] No, it’s my motto in real life too.
Ally: I don’t have the technical language to explain exactly what I hear is happening, but I feel like your music has matured a lot since I first encountered it, both in terms of your voice sounding really different and your production and instrumentation feeling more mature too. Where do you see those changes coming from?
Anju: Part of it is coming from a real desire to grow as a musician, as an artist, as a producer, and wanting to have something different and more grown to share each time. Each time I make something new, how can I try something different? Practically and technically speaking, I started taking voice lessons a year ago. I haven’t released anything since I started taking voice lessons, but I do agree that my voice has changed and it’s actually changing even more now that I’m practicing voice almost every day, which I never did before. I feel like it’s getting stronger and more powerful and more controlled. Part of the production stuff feels like me and some of that feels like the attitude I had before I encountered Antenna Cloud Farm, where I was like, industry standard means that things need to be mixed and mastered a certain way. At the time of our interview and even a few years afterwards, I was mixing everything myself and I didn’t fully understand or appreciate what mastering was, so I was basically just uploading my own MP3s to streaming platforms, which is kind of badass I think! It’s cool that I was doing that without really knowing what the “industry standard” is, but I do think that in the last few years I’ve realized that someone else can mix this and that could add more dimension or bring things out in production that I wouldn’t be able to, and mastering is important if I want to have it on the radio alongside other songs and not have it be super quiet or weird quality. Those are the practical changes that happened.
Ally: With all that in mind, what’s your relationship with your early work, thinking back to your first projects you created?
Anju: Aww, very tender! I feel very tenderly and sweetly about it. I definitely don’t want all of it to be public, but I have a loving energy towards it. I was just remembering when I gave you my CD my first year of college. That’s so sweet actually! I kind of love that. I know some people feel cringey about their old things, and maybe that’s there a little bit, but mostly I’m like, wow, that person really had a lot to say and they really did their thing to say it! And now I have different things to say, but I love that I said what I said then, and I love that I said it that way.
Ally: I really admire having that attitude towards your early work. For me, I find my early stuff so cringey and kind of hard to revisit, so I love that you have a more tender, loving relationship with it. I know that you’ve been working on your current project for a while—what’s the story of this project and what has the process of making it taught you so far?
Anju: It’s been four years! I wrote the songs from 2020-2022 when I was living in Minneapolis and moving through a lot of grief and heartbreak, and of course there was the pandemic and the uprisings and one of my friends passed away unexpectedly. There were a lot of different layers of grief that I was moving through. And one of the ways that the grief took form is that I was feeling a lot of unbelonging. In Minneapolis there were people and communities that I set the intention of building with and had built with a little bit, but for whatever reason it didn’t work out. So moving through that city felt really painful and I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to belong there. And maybe this is a corny diaspora thing, but I was like, if I don’t belong where I grew up, where can I even belong? In my last year in Minneapolis, I was living near the Mississippi River and taking a lot of nature walks by myself and metabolizing a lot of the grief through those walks and time in nature. And through that process of metabolizing, I was making medicine for myself that I needed at that time and maybe even earlier in the stages of grief. I was also living alone for the first time and it was just me and my instruments, so I was picking things up and tinkering around all the time. The album was written in that context in Minneapolis among the forest and river and solitude of it all. But the creation of the album has been so healing—the recording and production process of it. I’ve been healing from musical isolation, which I think is a product of the Western classical musical culture of competition and rigidity that I grew up in. In the process of building this album, I wanted to produce it myself, but there were also a lot of people I wanted to bring in and have them bring their special sauce to these songs. That’s so healing because songs that emerged from a place of such isolation and pain get to be held and zhuzhed up by my community. I also started playing with a band more regularly and that’s felt so healing. I don’t know if the songs are objectively sad, but I wrote them while I was really sad, so the association for them is a lot less sad now that a lot more people are bringing their light and amazingness to them.
Ally: What’s it like to work with all these collaborators while also making sure that the music stays true to your individual vision—or do you let go of that a little bit?
Anju: When it comes to performing, I definitely let go. Usually it’s a one-time thing, and whoever I’m playing with has something unique to bring to that specific show, so I give them loose ideas but just let them do their thing. When it comes to production and arrangement, I do have a specific feeling or texture or sound flavor in mind, but I also feel really open and excited for what whoever I’m playing with brings. They’re usually people who have a certain instrument or improvisational style that I want to bring in, so I think that the careful crafting part happens when I’m thinking about who I want to bring in in the first place. But once we’re there and I’ve transmitted the vibe, do your thing, baby! It’s such a gift to find people who can hear and see me musically. These people really hear what I’m doing and enhance it with their own gifts!
Ally: What is your relationship with performance and how has starting to work with a band shifted how you approach performance?
Anju: It’s so much more fun when there’s other people on stage with me! It’s been cool to do the same songs with different groups of people. Everyone has different takes on improvisation. There’s two guitarists I’ve worked with who are very different from each other. One has a very Western and North Indian classical background, and the other one has a super folk background, and they’ve played the same songs with me and it’s so interesting because their styles are so different and they’re coming from two different places. And they’ve never met, but some of the choices that they make are so similar to each other. So maybe the music is bringing a common thing out.
Ally: What has it been like learning how to improvise as someone who came up in a rigid Western classical musical background?
Anju: This grad program I just started is Contemporary Musical Arts, but it used to be called Contemporary Improvisation, and there’s a lot of improv in it. It’s been cool. It was definitely scary at first…I felt like I didn’t have the skills to improvise, but the truth is that making music has been such a vulnerable and personal and sanctuary-like process. When I’m writing songs, that’s a type of improvisation that I’m doing in isolation, but I didn’t know if I was ready to bring that vulnerable self to a real-time exploration with other people. Also, I’ve never had enough facility on any instrument to be able to improvise on an instrument. I have these ideas in my head, but I can’t get them out with my fingers or bow. But I’ve been leaning into vocalist identity recently, and I can totally get it to go from my brain or my heart to my voice! That’s also felt liberating: that I can improvise with my voice and that’s enough, even good.
Ally: What made you want to go back to school and what are you hoping that you’ll get from it?
Anju: I honestly didn’t see this coming. Did you?
Ally: For you? No, not really. It was kind of a surprise.
Anju: I think it was the community I met last summer. I was able to connect and collaborate with them and it was amazing, but I felt like there was a musical language that they were speaking. A small part of that was theory and notation, but a big part of it is that they were simply a lot more practiced than me because they studied music in school. There’s so many ways to be a strong musician and achieve virtuosity, but the particular people I was around last summer were opening new worlds for me and making me realize that there were all these ways I wanted to grow. And it’s not even necessarily around my songwriting, maybe that’s part of it, but it’s more like how can I be a better collaborator? How can I improvise in a group setting? How can I hold space for other people? Maybe the musical isolation healing process has made me realize that music education had me really isolate my musical process, and I’ve gotten to a point and healed enough that I want to learn and grow more and there are certain educational and institutional things I want to look into. Not that I’m not wary of some of these institutions out here, including my own. But I want rigor and I’m ready for the rigor.
Ally: I stole this question from the VS Podcast because I really like it. Who are some artists—in any medium, not just musicians—that people should study in order to more deeply understand your work?
Anju: Wait, they ask that on VS?
Ally: Yeah, the new hosts, Brittany Rogers and Ajanaé Dawkins, are really good!
Anju: Okay, I’ve gotta listen. Do they ask that to everyone? That’s a great question. When it comes to process, Lynda Barry—she’s an illustrator. She’s really impacted my musical creative process. She has a lot to say about outputting without judgment and play through creativity and activating your inner child. Spiritually, there’s this tarot person—I’m not even a big tarot person, but the way she writes about tarot is really meaningful to me—Jessica Dore. I love the work of Louise Erdrich. It really impacts how I write and create. Okay, I’m trying to think about musicians. Joni Mitchell, I suppose. Her songwriting is really powerful and definitely shaped me and continues to shape me.
Ally: What are your favorite or most nourishing creative activities outside of music?
Anju: Drawing, inspired by Lynda Barry. Cooking for sure. Recently I’ve been on a baking expedition. Those feel really lovely and concretely productive, like there’s always a benefit that I can reap from those creative endeavors. Also vlogging, or filmmaking. Just short little films. And writing in my journal—I guess that’s not always creative, but I love that. I think there’s a Shira Erlichman quote that’s like, “Do the dish and it feeds the song, weed the garden and it writes the poem,” and I’m like, “So true, bestie!”
Ally: What’s something you baked recently that you’re proud of?
Anju: I made these turmeric snickerdoodles and they were so good! Maybe I can send you some next batch. I didn’t realize you could mail cookies, but if you do priority shipping you can just do it!
For more of Anju’s brilliance, check out their Bandcamp, website, or newsletter.
Yes, I was in an a cappella group. My dark secret is out.