COVER STORY: Arjun Kanungo Has a Grand Plan

Arjun Kanungo is working all the time. He’s seated on a hotel bed in Tokyo in a black tank top and talking about how he wants to just hang out and party in Japan, but he just ends up working. It’s well into the evening in the Land of the Rising Sun, and Kanungo is not winding down just yet. 

“I’m actually at a shoot. We’re in a hotel room, so I’m not home yet,” he chuckles. If there’s a tinge of tiredness, Kanungo, 34, does well to hide it. Or, he’s just genuinely excited to be making inroads into Japan’s music and technology industry in recent times—where his album Industry2 (released in August 2023) had the song “India To Japan” with Japanese rapper Cyber Rui, a more authentic output came almost a year later, with “Tell Me” releasing in February this year. 

On the plaintive J-pop song, you hear Kanungo’s collaborator, Japanese artist Ren’s voice first, taking on a pop croon in Japanese and English. Kanungo steps in just a bit later and “Tell Me” flows like a late-night piano ballad, written by acclaimed and globe-trotting songwriter Kanata Okajima. She’s written for everyone from BTS to TWICE to Baby Metal, so there’s an earnestness that just pours out of “Tell Me” thanks to Okajima. 

The song was written nearly a year ago, but he learned that the hands of the Japanese music industry are meticulous planners. “When we wrote ‘Tell Me’ and finished it in early 2023, Ren had his whole year planned out. His management was clear that this was a song for February 2024,” Kanungo says, with respect in his voice. 

On his previous visits, Kanungo has plotted video shoots and songwriting sessions. This time, it’s been more business meetings and investor meetings for his company One Mind—a music company that will now have a Japan headquarters—as well as One Mind Technologies, a tech arm he’s building with India’s top entertainment lawyer Priyanka Khimani and two more co-founders. 

“The first cool thing we’re building is a legal tool, like an AI lawyer. We’re building that for the creator economy at the moment. We should have a beta version out as early as June,” Kanungo says. It’s for the Indian audience at first, but they also want it to work in Japan. The artist feels there’s a lot of “information asymmetry” in Japan, and the music industry still needs more organizing than in India. 

This is Arjun Kanungo re-establishing himself in the fast-moving world of music, where you can run out of credibility about as quickly as you hit your first few million streams. Kanungo had a crisis of confidence when his album Industry2 came out. He says, “The mistake that I made was I had too many different types of songs and I put them all into one album.” 

Working on the album while recovering from a hip fracture was also grueling, and it meant that he didn’t get to tour with Industry2 and it didn’t reach people in at least one essential way. Artistically, Kanungo – who has tried everything from funk to hip-hop to rock and electronica – realized that he should stick to pop. “When I was trying to expand my horizons as an artist, I made the wrong choice of expanding horizontally. What I should have done was go deeper into what I already know rather than trying too many things that are not my genre,” he says. 

This is coming from the voice who first cut his teeth being part of legendary vocalist Asha Bhosle’s touring act as a vocalist, going around the globe, and then being part of the Indian indie circuit even as he was enlisted by composer duo Sachin-Jigar for the quirky “Khoon Choos Le” from Go Goa Gone in 2013. It was only in 2015 that he took a shot at mainstream pop success, releasing “Baaki Baatein Peene Baad” with hip-hop/pop star Badshah via Sony Music India. 

After a slew of singles like “Aaya Na Tu” and “La La La” with the backing of major labels and star singers, plus film soundtrack projects, Kanungo released Industry in 2022, which had the King-assisted songs “Ilzaam” and “Ishq Samdunar.” Industry2 arrived just a year later, but in a wholly different direction. 

At the end of it, Kanungo is glad that it didn’t take more than one album for course correction, where sometimes artists are five albums into the “rebel without a cause situation that’s not working,” the singer says. He adds, “I think it’s taken a lot of confidence for me to realize that my sh*t was good enough.” 

After “Tell Me” with Ren to making in-roads into Japan, Kanungo tapped Sri Lankan artist Chamath Sangeeth, taking his song “Nohithunata” to make his new pop song “Suno Na.” It’s a no-frills, vocal-centric tune that plays up Kanungo’s soft, sometimes high-pitched vocals that he’s known for, coupled with appropriately romantic and introspective lyrics written by Murtuza Gadiwala. 

It’s a calculated move to adapt “Nohithunata.” Kanungo points out that the song had topped the Sri Lankan Daily 100 list on Apple Music, and is inching towards a million streams on Spotify. “So we acquired that song to be done in Hindi. I think it’s going to be a big one because it’s already doing so well in the regional version, and the [Hindi] version has also come out great.” 

One Mind Music—Kanungo’s label which has released “Suno Na”—had its funding secured in May and slowly, the artist began building his team. There are about 20 hires and they’ve been moving forward gung-ho, as he puts it. “The team is killing it,” he says. 

The goal is to release about 150 songs this year on One Mind Music, which includes Kanungo’s songs (including a new EP) and artists like Ocean Sharma, producer Nesz, pop artist Shivvyy (“He’s gonna be the biggest thing in Bollywood playback because his voice is exceptional,” Kanungo says) and more. 

Kanungo says with a little bit of concern that they’re only about 40 songs into the release plan. “I think we’re about seven songs behind as per our schedule,” he says. The way Kanungo describes it, the One Mind office is a creative space, which means that everyone is a bit slower when it comes to “drudge work.” He says with a laugh, “Everybody takes it easy once I leave the office. They’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s party.’  Because when I’m there, I’m like, ‘Dude, we got to hit the deadlines.’ It’s the creative side [that] everybody loves, and they really love doing that.” The unglamorous and tedious tasks like syncing lyrics to streaming platforms or adding a Canvas for Spotify tracks can be a downer. 

One of Kanungo’s favorite memories of Japan is the karaoke bars. It’s part of popular culture associated with Japan, as Kanungo knew, but he didn’t realize how close the depictions were to real life.
He says, “What you see in movies is literally what you experience. It’s usually like these salarymen, who blow off steam. They go to work, and then they really party. They really know how to use this as an emotional outlet. It’s incredible to see the broken English. They’re singing English songs. It’s very entertaining. It’s amazing.” 

When it’s Kanungo’s turn on the mic, he can blow them away with Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” but the singer says it’s not a competitive space at all. “It’s a very special place to them because they get to blow off steam with their bosses or whoever they come with, and they’re not judged. I think it’s a very sacred thing for them,” he adds. 

Kanungo linked up with another Indian Japanophile on this trip – producer Karan Kanchan. They were originally slated to fly into Tokyo together but eventually, they met up and there’s a potential collaboration between Kanungo and the beatsmith behind hits like DIVINE’s “Baazigar” and more relevantly, his early J-trap sound. “We were just hanging out every day, man. He’s just going to Osaka now, so I’m probably not going to see him for the rest of the trip. But every other day, we’ve been hanging. We’ve been talking about music, we’ve been meeting production houses here, talking about songs together,” Kanungo says. There’s a mutual love for Japan, but Kanungo concedes that Kanchan is the bigger fan of the country. “He’s also very into the subcultures as well and really into traditional Japanese music,” he adds. 

There’s a certain reverence that Kanungo also obviously holds for Japan. It started with a fairly touristy visit to the country with his wife – creative designer, actor, and model Carla Dennis. Now, he not only has collaborations lined up with several Japanese artists, but also has a local partner in the country for One Mind Japan, along with liaisons who have helped him get in the same room as renowned brands like Pokémon, major labels, and music companies like TuneCore and Ableton. 

Kanungo is leaning in and he’s confident that he can be the bridge between India and Japan. Whether intentional or not, on “Tell Me,” it’s Ren’s Japanese vocals that come in first and it’s not about an Indian artist hogging the attention but being respectful of what the song needs. “I think when you’re writing for Japan, you want to write in Japanese. Obviously, I can’t write in Japanese, and they wanted me to sing in Japanese. They wanted the whole song to be Japanese, but I was not confident. I didn’t want to mess this up,” he says. 

His next song brings in Japanese bassist-singer MINA, a 23-year-old artist who’s just released her own debut track “Tenjo Tenge Yuiga Dokuson” on May 10th. Kanungo and MINA have worked on a song whose English title is “Tell Me You Love Me.” He says, “I’ve actually made her play a bass line on one of my Hindi songs. She’s a slap pop artist, so it’s really cool to see a Japanese girl playing a Hindi song.” 

There are bigger Japanese music stars that he’s collaborating with as well, but he’s keeping that under wraps since—like with “Tell Me”—the projects would take a while before they’re promoted and marketed at the end of the year. What’s Kanungo’s way to seek out artists? “I’ve just been binging on Japanese pop culture, man,” he says with a laugh. Everybody has been welcoming of him, with mutual excitement levels about working together. He adds, “I’m very interested in doing stuff with the stars of tomorrow, not the stars of yesterday here, because I feel like that’s really the value add in the culture.” 

It all comes out via One Mind, a label that Kanungo says is not just cross-cultural and looks beyond borders but also wants to be consistent. “Our belief is that everything is future forward. Everything from your A&R to your songwriting to your internal process, everything is future forward,” he says. 

Outside of Japan-focused tunes, Kanungo has a song called “Mahi Ve” with Shivvyy out in mid-May and a couple of songs with Mumbai rapper Gravity coming out in June. Kanungo, who appeared on “Kyu” off Gravity’s Moonbounce album, says, “This is my exit from hip-hop, in the sense that I don’t want to be a rapper.” One Mind Music is also plotting a song with Ocean Sharma as a theme song for “one of the biggest games in India,” according to Kanungo. 

Timed with the monsoon, there’s a pop EP about baarish [rains] coming out in July. He says, “I think I’m known for those kind of songs as well. So I was like, ‘Why not?’” 

Credits

Writer: Anurag Tagat

Photographer: Arjun Mark

Creative Director and Concept: Peony Hirwani

Creative Designer: Carla Ruth Dennis

Stylist: Sejal Parulkar

Makeup: Suprabha Jadhav

Hair: Pratik Patkar

Tailor: Rakesh Yadav

Producer: Shivanshu Gupta

Associate Producer: Sarvesh Baheti

Photo Assistant: Rohith Rajan, Gopi Krishnan, Aditya Panwar

Assistant to Talent: Nihal Ahmed

Assistant to Producer: Kartik Reddy

Set Assistant: Priyansh Paul

Production House: One Mind Music

Videographers: Shivanshu Gupta, Sarvesh Baheti, Nihal Ahmed

BTS Video Editor: Shivanshu Gupta

Location: Neuma, Mumbai

Catering: Nair on Fire