Rohan Solomon Looks Back at the Four-Year Journey of Releasing New Album ‘Strung Out To Dry’

Sometime in early 2022, New Delhi artist Rohan Solomon was having a rough time on the mental health front. An album that had been slowly trickling in the form of stellar singles like “We Demand Change,” “Victoria’s Secret” and “Set Me Free” were already out, but it wasn’t something the singer-songwriter from rock band Cyanide had the inclination to complete.

Then, his co-producer, composer Harshit Verma showed him orchestral pieces written for a string section that were written in a day. Over a Zoom call, Verma placed these pieces between Solomon’s songs – which already had plenty of string arrangements – and the artist says he felt hope again. “I remember that being a huge turning point for me, mentally. I got excited about this album again,” Solomon says over a video call. From that day onwards, Solomon and Verma spent every day recording pieces of what became his 20-track solo debut album Strung Out To Dry.

In the making for four years, Strung Out To Dry also evolved into having a narrative revolving around a protagonist who undertakes a journey in matters of the heart and emerges changed. By the time we get to “Croatia” – which comes with a music video that depicts heartbreak in classic fashion – the story of this character has seen love, loss and a rollercoaster of emotions, as Solomon terms it. On the stomping, ever-relevant “We Demand Change,” there’s a slight detour from the prominent love story of sorts, with the character wanting to go back home and rebuild in the face of being disrupted by violence around the world. “Home is the place where he can be peaceful and rebuild,” Solomon adds.

The seven instrumental orchestral pieces by Verma break Strung Out To Dry into different chapters and phases, clocking the album up to 52 minutes. “I’m so happy we took our time and didn’t cut any corners and did it the right way. The whole process was very fluid and organic,” Solomon says about working on the album for years together and releasing singles along the way.

Watch the video for “Croatia” below.

In some ways, Strung Out To Dry feels like a rock record that calls back to Cyanide in terms of riffs, urgency and hooks, except now it’s got a grand string section as a prominent element in the mix on all songs. Solomon laughs about this comparison when it comes up, but does note that he wrote “Croatia” soon after Cyanide had played their 10-year anniversary show, around 2013. “It was still the same guy that wrote all the Cyanide songs. There’s definitely some spillage over there. But yes, I could never have imagined what the strings brought to it when I wrote it. It was just this acoustic guitar and myself singing,” he adds.

There are plenty more songs in the vault, but Solomon does want to “just soak in this for a while.” He adds, “I’m constantly writing something or the other… there are always songs that are in my head. Recently, I took a little solo trip to Coorg, and I wrote maybe three songs over there.” He notes that it would likely go in a different direction and not get the same sonic treatment as Strung Out To Dry though. “It’s not going to be an orchestral thing for sure, because that’s on that [album]. Whatever I do next is definitely going to be something different,” Solomon says.

Listen to ‘Strung Out to Dry’ below.