My First Release: Shantanu Pandit

“These past few weeks… They have been some of the best weeks of my life.”

It was optimism-inspiring to hear these words from Shantanu Pandit on my 27th birthday as I sat cross-legged on the floor among the audience at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art to watch him bring his first tour promoting his album ‘Milk Teeth’ to a conclusion. The New Delhi singer-songwriter had spent the weeks prior travelling by road across the length of India in a bespoke caravan to share his music while pausing at each stop to not just give but take in a sense of the places he performed at.

“I had been holed up on the mountains when we put out the album and Dhruv was like ‘Dude, you released an album. You can’t just sleep on it like that. Now you’ve got to come down and let’s take it on tour and celebrate it’”, he continued at the show before launching into chirpy comforting melodies that underpin lines like “Put that bullet in my head // Shoot me dead // Put that bullet in my head // Get it over with”.

Shantanu in his bespoke caravan for 'Milk Teeth' tour in 2022 | Photograph by Aarohi Mehra

Walking through melancholic reminiscing and processing sorrow over dreamy musicality and nostalgic lightness is what defines the 2021 album. The very dichotomic sophistication is what highlights how far his songwriting has come since his first official release, the EP ‘Skunk In The Cellar’ in 2014 – which, like ‘Milk Teeth’, was also an album born out of seeing a relationship heartbreakingly come to end. However, the natural propensity to just write and share music disconnected from the cycle of talking about it, promoting it and packaging it remains a common thread.

“I didn't have that word in my vocabulary,” he says while pondering on the idea of “official release” at the start of his career. “I was very much naive to the whole idea of putting out music in a proper format, putting out a press statement and all that.”

Shantanu Pandit in 2012 for Tehelka TV

Before ‘Skunk In The Cellar’, Shantanu had been frequently sharing raw performances on Youtube as soon as he recorded them. Whether it was a host at HIT 95FM giving him CD recordings of his appearance on the radio or the sound engineer at Blue Frog giving him the soundboard recordings from his performance, the then-teenager musician’s first instinct was to just put it on Youtube as soon as he got home. “I didn’t think that hard. For me, I just heard the songs back and immediately thought, ‘I want to share this with my friends. I want to share this with my family.’”

That immediacy was shaken up and replaced by process when he was contacted by his soon-to-become long-term manager and Pagal Haina head honcho Dhruv Singh to record the songs which were to become ‘Skunk In The Cellar’. “I was like: ‘Hey, so we've got the songs. Let's just put them out.’ And he said, ‘No. This is just the start. Now we need to plan the whole release.’ And I went, ‘What does that mean?’” The process meant Shantanu had to wait for artwork to be made, distribution to be aligned and press strategies put in place before the music and the artist could represent each other to the world.

Shantanu Pandit in 2014 | Photograph by Shiv Ahuja

Even while he could see the sense in all the auxiliary activities, the waiting time struggled to sit well with a songwriter that developed his material and style with notable intensity. “One thing that has been recurring through my career so far, as a songwriter, is that generally, I move fast. If I'm sitting eight months from now, I would look back at my material and be like, ‘Man! I need to write a bunch of new shit because I don't want to play this old shit.’” Even the debut EP ‘Skunk In The Cellar’ felt like a reinvention for the songwriter who started as a 16-year-old playing largely Bob Dylan covers at open mics before quickly replacing them with fast and loud originals that he dubs as his first wave of songwriting.

The instinct to move on quickly translated to Shantanu punctuating his career with jumps from one outlet to the next – most notably the group Run It’s The Kid and his moniker Morning Mourning, which was partly formed as a subconscious reaction against the limitations imposed by formal and elaborate creation and release cycles to retreat back into the straightforward sincerity of an artist just exorcising his creative impulses.

Even while concluding the first promotional tour around ‘Milk Teeth’ in 2022 at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Shantanu’s set was replete with new material ripe for another album. At the same time, littered with older material too and light-hearted addressal of his relationship with it all. Greater patience has seeped in with the artist who crafted ‘Milk Teeth’ after 4 years of writing.

Shantanu in 2022 for 'Milk Teeth' promotional tour | Photograph by Aarohi Mehra

“I have recently been able to enjoy performing live after a long time,” he says after walking me through years that included getting disenchanted with the return from releasing music, riding across the country as an escape, diverging into educational degrees, losing the individual self in a long-term relationship and the hardships finding that self again – themes that he tackled on ‘Milk Teeth’ through reflecting back on memories of growing up.

After more than a decade as an artist, the New Delhi artist has traversed a long and winding road till the multiple facets of his career are beginning to be at peace with one another. His declaration of touring ‘Milk Teeth’ as a highlight of life so far is a testament to that – further supported as he recently embarked on another one, this time across North-East India. While announcing it, he remarks: “I didn’t want the last one to end when it did and I’ve been itching to get back on the road ever since.”

Listen to 'Milk Teeth' below and head here for tickets and dates of Shantanu's tour across North-East India.

Words by Amaan Khan

Lead artwork designed by Sijya Gupta