Exclusive Premiere: Janvi Anand’s Stirring Rendition of ‘Come Home’
The New Delhi pop-rock artist recently returned from an 11-city U.S. tour in June
A promotional still from Janvi Anand's new video 'Come Home.' Photo: Mohit Kapil
Despite being in the U.S. for a few years, studying at Musicians Institute in Los Angeles, New Delhi pop-rock artist Janvi Anand had been trying to figure out a tour there since 2015.
In May this year, the singer-songwriter’s Classified tour was announced, featuring living room gigs and club shows across 11 cities all the way through to June. “It was a 45-day solo trip across the country,” she says.
Straight off, at her first gig in Portland she found the best reason to perform intimate shows. Anand recounts, “A lady got emotional while hearing one of my songs and texted her sister ‘I love you.’ She hadn’t heard from her sister after their father passed away five years ago. But her sister replied that day. She came up to me after the show and shared this story with me. She showed me her phone and her sister had replied: ‘I love you too, I miss you.’ I could see how happy this woman was at that moment.”
Evocative pop is clearly Anand’s strength, which is why she reworked her love song “Come Home” (originally on her 2015 EP Inside These Pages) and turned it into a string section-aided ballad that includes piano and acoustic guitars at the base. She grapples with a broken heart and lost love, with its accompanying music video featuring actor Mehak Mehra in different settings of emotional distress. Anand however notes that the idea to create a new rendition came when her brother-in-law lost his father in late 2017. “As an adult, it was the first death in my family which I saw that closely and just seeing how all of them dealt with the situation differently made me want to rearrange the song. It is still about love and longing but it subtly includes a lot of other elements of how life still goes on when you lose someone that close,” she says.
This version of “Come Home” includes string arrangement from Hollywood-based violinist Lila Crosswhite and co-production from composer Noor Che’ree (who contributed to Anand’s 2017 album Faces of Love).
Watch the video for “Come Home” below.
