The 24-year-old singer-songwriter, currently based in Los Angeles, talks about overcoming hurdles to record her 11-track debut
In her two years in Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Janvi Anand counts seeing rockers Maroon 5 live for late night TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live! and running into John Mayer as things you would only see in America’s music and entertainment centerpoint. But the New Delhi artist wasn’t just there for fun, though.
After graduating from Musicians Institute’s Guitar Program last year, Janvi says she didn’t feel any newbie jitters in L.A. “The city is very accepting. They are constantly looking for something fresh and of course talent is always appreciated,” she says. The guitarist, producer and singer, for her part, had already become an experienced and established musician, setting up a music school in Delhi, playing shows in and around the capital, and having her own studio.
Once in L.A., Janvi released an acoustic EP Inside These Pages in 2015 and began prepping for her next release. She says, “I collaborated with an EDM producer named Anthony Arocho and we recorded about six tracks for our EP Summer Love, which was scheduled to be released in the summer of 2016, but due to some serious health issues of my producer we couldn’t finish the project.”
Even when she went on to conceptualize and begin writing and recording her debut full-length album Faces of Love in early 2016, health concerns of bandmates popped up, but the 11-track album remains a collaboration-heavy effort. Working with Hollywood-based producer-composer Noor Che’ree on bass and German mixing and mastering engineer Jonas Petersen, Faces of Love presented Janvi at her most diverse ”“ her earthy vocals about love stories taking center-stage as much as the addition of saxophone (“Faces of Love,” “Don’t Care Where It Goes”), string section (“Come With Me To Another World,” “The Girl On a Train”) and piano.
Ever since the album released, Janvi has been taking all feedback ”“ positive and negative. She says, “There has been some criticism too but about small things like use of a word in a song, or how I phrased a word at one place in one song. But these are personal opinions which help me grow as a musician.”
For someone whose first studio contribution was on a djent project (Indo-Dutch project Phaedra’s single “Bipolarity,” in 2014), Janvi switches between jazz, blues, pop and hard rock on Faces of Love. She says, “I try and be as versatile as I can and constantly try to push myself.”
While there have been shows at well-known venues like the House of Blues in Anaheim and Hard Rock Cafes in Hollywood, Janvi was on a solo run of shows in New Delhi early this year. Up next, a West Coast tour in the Fall and maybe another India tour. “Hopefully in another two months, I would have something more to talk about performances in India,” she says.
Listen to Faces of Love here.
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