Ricky Kej is all set to release several singles and maybe an album too, in quick succession, as we find out!

Multiple Grammy Award winner Ricky Kej was on tour again and this time around it was four cities and in collaboration with The Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts. This new edition, the second edition of his Rhythm of the Earth series took off on June 22 in The Leela Palace Bengaluru and moved to three other cities — Chennai (June 23), Udaipur (June 28) and Jaipur (June 29) — all hosted by The Leela. We caught up with him post the tour to talk music, his upcoming work and more…

Considering the tour was part of a series, how different was the experience?

It was quite similar, actually, as an experience. But the thing is that in terms of content, it was quite different. This time it was a fixed band and I was quite happy about that. Rehearsals were so much easier.I was  touring with Sudhir Yadhuvanshi, Siddharth Basrur and Shradha Ganesh and we also had Manoj George on violin; and Karthik Mani and Giridhar Udupa on carnatic percussions. We did a couple of new songs — about three to four were brand new songs and the rest of them, maybe about two or three songs were songs that we’ve just recently started performing.

Now, as fans, we’re always wondering where we can access the music we hear at these concerts, considering most of your album releases are limited to your international collabs?

What I’m going to be doing is that this year, there are quite a few songs that we’ve been performing on stage that we haven’t yet released to audiences. I’m going to start doing that, I think hopefully from July onwards. I’m going to make a concentrated effort to start putting out these songs one by one.

That’s amazing! So, when can we expect the first album and what’s next?
I’ll start putting out singles for now, because nowadays when it comes to albums, they are very difficult to put out unless conceptually it is an album. Like for example, the kind of stuff that I put out with the international musicians where conceptually the whole thing is an album where songs flow into each other — those make sense as albums. So, maybe from July onwards, what I’ll start doing is that I’ll start putting out a song every three weeks and that way by the end of the year, whatever songs that I have in the bank will be released. But in addition to that there are another three albums that I’m working on right now. One of them is another collaboration with Stewart Copeland and that’s ready to be released, hopefully by October. It’s sort of like an orchestral album. Then, the other two albums are music for mindfulness. It’s sort of like the kind of music that I do — which is soft, atmospheric and meditative — very Indian in nature. Those albums are also complete and will hopefully release by the end of July or the beginning of August.

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