Ananda Sen and Miti Adhikari. Photo: Tara McManus
Rock artist Ananda Sen and producer Miti Adhikari were like family. So when the veteran sound engineer was admitted to the hospital just ahead of the listening session for his solo album, Pages From The Past, Sen was on the verge of canceling the event altogether. “I was going to cancel it because I was in no state,” he says. “But, you know, Sam, his wife was like, you can’t do it. He would be super pissed at you.”
Speaking just days after Adhikari’s passing, the Kolkata-bred, Goa-based Sen—best known for his work with rock acts like the Supersonics and the Ritornellos—simply says, “This is the hardest album I’ve made.”
About eight years in the making, this one is deeply personal for Sen. It’s not just because Adhikari—the one who pushed Sen to complete and release Pages From The Past—is no more, but also because Sen mined some of his most intimate memories to write songs like “Chang,” “Sky High” and “Give It All Away.”
He says, “It’s like a diary, I didn’t want to release it. It’s too much about me and my life, and a really big part of this taking so long has been me not wanting to release it, and really it’s Miti [who pushed me], because he was really proud of it. He thought it was really good.” When asked about Adhikari’s favorite songs, Sen says he had a particular soft spot for the lead single “Sky High” as well as the title track and the melancholic, dreamy “Give It All Away,” which closes Pages From The Past.
Some songs have been in the works since the Ritornellos days, but there was always a hesitance from Sen about writing and releasing music after feeling “burnt” from his time in indie bands. The artist had gotten back to playing guitar after a three-year break, when he focused on what has become his current job—teaching English.
At Adhikari’s “nagging,” Sen finally got around to putting some songs down in Kolkata and then in Goa, where he moved in 2018. Adhikari even followed Sen to Goa, living down the road from each other, meeting every other day for drinks, dinner, conversations, and music. Sen says of the process, “He knew exactly what I wanted. I knew exactly what he wanted. And it was just fun, you know, we’d be having a drink one night, and we’d be like, ‘Oh, let’s see what we did [on a song].’”
Sonically, these are songs that stay true to Sen’s rock and roll aesthetic, from Dylan to Springsteen and more. If you liked the Supersonics’ debut album Maby Baking, then there’s definitely something for you. Sen even brought in former bandmates, including Avinash Chordia (recording remotely in Australia), guitarist Rohan Ganguli, bassist Nitin Mani, Mumbai pop band The Colour Compound’s Bradley Tellis, indie rock act the Ganesh Talkies’ vocalist-guitarist Suyasha Sengupta, and bassist Roheet Mukherjee, among others.
Sen says, “Miti practically played on almost all the songs. Whether it’s a little bit of keyboard or a little guitar part, and I wanted that. Because in the studio, it was just the both of us. Those are the best memories for me.” Given that the two had often spoken about playing the songs from Pages From The Past as a duo, Sen is now kind of dismissive of the idea that he could become a bandleader and take this solo album on the road.
Still, there is a silver lining even in what Sen calls a “Shakespearean tragedy” in Adhikari’s passing before the release of the album. “His passing is going to make a lot of people hear it. I was going to do this really lo-fi release and it would have just flown under the radar. But I think maybe that’s his last gift to me,” Sen says.
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