Brooklyn-based quartet Raavi has been busy touring throughout the country over the past year. I caught them for the first time, opening for Hannah Jadagu at Bowery Ballroom in October and was blown away by their unique and alluring sound. I had to learn more, so frontwoman and guitarist Raavi Sita picked up my call to chat about their upcoming tour, new single, and the early days of the band.
[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Hey Raavi, thank you so much for joining me today.
No problem. Thank you for having me.
Awesome. So I just have a couple of questions to ask you about your upcoming tour as well as your music and your new song coming out next month.
Yeah, that’s great.
Okay, perfect. So I want to start out with what you have coming up very soon. You’re about to go on tour with String Machine – traveling all throughout the Northeast and Midwest in just a week. How are you feeling about it? Is there a city that you’re most excited to play in or revisit?
Yeah. I’m definitely really excited for tour. This is the first time that we’ve been invited onto a tour that we didn’t have to do any of the booking for. So it’s kind of like the most relaxed I’ve been going into a tour ever because we really are very much like a “do it yourself” kind of band. So it was really cool that someone wanted to bring us on tour, first of all, but also the amount of work that we had to put into it was minimal. It’s nice to be like “alright, we’re just gonna go on tour”. It’s our fourth one of the year, and third one since this summer. So yeah, really excited for it. I think the only city that we’re hitting this time that we haven’t directly played in is Troy, which is in upstate New York, but we’ve played around there in Albany and Kingston. I’m really excited for our Boston show and the Cleveland Show. We always really enjoy that city, Cleveland, Ohio. Underrated.
Okay, Cleveland. Good to know.
Yeah, I recommend it.
You touched on this, but you’ve gone on quite a few tours over the past two years. Do you feel like you’ve kind of gotten used to that routine of tour and are there any rituals that you do before or after shows or does it feel like a new experience every time you go on a tour?
I think I’ve definitely gotten used to it at this point. You know. The tours that we do are far from fancy. So mostly, I’m just really exhausted the whole time even though it’s so much fun, but it’s kind of hard to get into rituals, and that’s something that I really like for my own life in general. I feel like this is gonna sound like a complaint but it’s not meant to be, it’s just like, I guess like an insight on myself personally, but [during tour], I really end up falling out of my routines that I’ve set up for myself. So whenever I come back from tour, I’m kind of off for the next couple of weeks before I start, like resetting my little rituals that I do to keep myself on schedule and stuff. One thing that I’ve been doing the past couple of tours just to deal with my energy levels is to completely cut out added sugar and minimize my caffeine intake. Both of those things help me sleep better and feel better on the road. So yeah, just try to just discipline myself and set myself up for success.
When I saw you opening for Hannah Jadagu, I noticed that you have this very natural nonchalance about you, but at the same time, a very commanding presence on stage – it’s quite magnetic. Is there any mindset that you enable when you’re playing a live show or do you feel like the music when you’re with the band on stage that you’re playing just naturally lends yourself to that presence?
Um, I’m not sure. I’ve been told some stuff that’s similar in the past and I think – not to demystify the scenario – but it’s really me just focusing really hard to not mess up. The songs that I play are quite difficult. I like to write things that are not easy for me to sing or play. I’m always just trying to challenge myself and that keeps me, motivated and also, like, entertained I guess. And I have really bad ADHD, so sometimes I tend to zone out even while performing, especially on a bigger stage like Bowery Ballroom which is where you saw me play.
Do you have a specific favorite song that you’d like to perform?
Yeah, it’s actually three songs we’ve been playing back to back on the last couple of tours basically since the summer. None of them are released or recorded even, but we’ve been playing them and the songs are called “Second Thoughts”, “Ready Set” and “Go”. “Ready Set” is like this intermediate song that goes between the two to set up time for me to tune, so it’s like a transition song that we wrote by just jamming out on the riff for “Go”, but it’s in a different time signature. I write in such stupid tunings, and it takes so long for me to get in and out of them sometimes. I wanted to avoid long drawn out tuning breaks, so yeah, it came out of a need to have a smoother transition, but I really like it because I think it hits really hard.
Yeah, I remember that moment during your Bowery set and I found it so cool to watch you guys on stage. When you’re able to turn your artistic preferences such as tuning into something like that, it’s so magical for the audience to witness.
You know what’s funny too, is that at that show, we have a friend who filled in on bass last minute. “Ready Set” starts with drums and bass, and I think they might have started in the wrong key, so you even saw us kind of mess the song up, but I think they switched into the right key fairly smoothly.
Yeah, it was awesome. I don’t think anyone even noticed. Also at that show, I spoke to some of your younger fans. They said that they discovered you when they were trying to see Sir Chloe open for a show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.
Right, yeah. I know who you’re talking about.
Yeah. They found you serendipitously and now they’re huge fans of you. As an artist, how does it feel when those moments happen? When you reach a fan organically like that?
Oh, I mean, it’s just the best feeling. I don’t ever do any of this for anyone else. If I was doing this for fame or accolades, first of all, I’d be very disappointed in my success level, and second of all, it’s just not the point of making music that’s satisfying for myself. With that lens, you know, a sort of authenticity, I suppose, it’s really sweet when things like that just happen, and someone who had no idea who we were a moment ago is now a really dedicated supporter. Yeah, I don’t know, it’s so beautiful. Like you said, it’s just serendipitous. I think that’s how you gain the most avid supporters.
So now, I want to take it back to your origin. I know that you grew up in Boston and the early iterations of your band were formed there. How did you start out and what compelled you to make the move to Brooklyn?
Yeah, definitely. So I basically just started playing with my friend, James, who is now still my bassist. Back when we were in high school, we had another band, and then I left that band, but I continued writing songs and would send him ideas. We played as a duo for a while, and then he went to Berklee and we met a lot of really cool musicians there. I say we, as I didn’t go to Berkelee, I just reaped the benefits of the school by being in the scene, but without the debt. The move to Brooklyn actually came because that iteration of the band was graduating. At that point, we had been in the Boston scene for several years. Boston is a great place to start a band, but it’s not necessarily the best place to stay in a band. The scene is very fickle. It changes very quickly because it’s such a college city. Every four years, there’s new bands that come through, and they almost always leave. That’s not great for the city, but eventually we all wanted to start our careers for real, and I couldn’t necessarily expect everyone to want to stay in Boston with me. I was also ready to leave, you know, 21 and ready to get out of my house and start paying rent for the first time. So yeah, we moved to New York.
Do you think you’ve noticed a change in both yourself and your art, since you’ve made that move and over the time that you’ve been here?
I feel a lot more independent now, and I have definitely taken a lot more initiative. I feel that I have a clearer sense of what I want out of the project and how I want things to sound, but it’s still very collaborative, and it is still a band. That’s how I always want it to be. I’m not one of those people who’s like, I wrote and recorded all of the parts to my project, like those very talented maniacs. I think that my friends who are in the band are all, you know, the experts of their instruments. I just want to push them in a direction.
What about the music community and the friends that you’ve made while living here? You know, in the case where you need someone to fill in, or people to bounce ideas off of. Do you feel like the community here has helped you in that way?
Totally, totally. We always say in our little musical friend group here that music is about the power of friendship, which is a little silly, but also feels very true. I feel really grateful to have found people that I mesh with both musically and just vibes-wise and politically. That was something I felt like I had in Boston to some degree as well because like I said, I was like, basically in that Berklee scene, we had a totally different group of friends, but the situation was kind of similar. If I needed a sub when I was in Boston, we had like ten people we could call because we were in a music school, and everyone wanted to perform and down for it. All the people here I’ve met through playing shows, and you talk to the people that you play shows with and that’s how you form the connections. That’s not necessarily the case with every band that you’re gonna play with, so I feel very grateful to have found this little community here.
So your music has a very mystical wistful effect, which matches up with what you talked about in terms of challenging yourself with different tuning and melodies, although it still maintains this equilibrium of having a rock and a groove to it. When I first heard you guys play, I immediately was reminded of the UK 90s band The Sundays. Was there any influence from them?
Totally. I love The Sundays, and they were a big influence in the newer era of the Raavi band’s musical catalog. Just like that good old 80s-90s sound. I love their guitar tones of course, and the way that [Harriet Wheeler] writes vocal melodies. She often doesn’t have a proper chorus or it feels like the melodies don’t even repeat ever sometimes. That’s something I’ve always kind of been interested in. There’s definitely a sense of yearning in the lyrics as well, and this poetic nature in them that definitely leaves you wondering.
What compelled you to first write music, and what inspires you to continue and keep writing?
I wanted to be a songwriter. I really started writing songs when I was a kid. I didn’t even play an instrument at the time. I would just like to write little jingles and sing them to myself in the shower. I wanted to learn guitar, so that I could be in a band, and I tried learning other people’s songs, and that was always really difficult for me. I would learn parts of a riff and then want to change it, or I’d make a mistake, learning the rhythm, and think oh what I just did was cool. Maybe I’ll just play that over and over again until something comes out of it. And then I would just start writing songs around that. So, I just started because I wanted to, and it didn’t necessarily come so naturally to me. I’ve always believed that songwriting is a skill just like playing the instrument is and you’re gonna get better at it, the more that you do it. I think it’s just because I started writing songs like “start to finish full songs: when I was like 11 or 12 around the same time I started playing guitar, that the muscle was always flexing.
So speaking of writing– your new song “About It” is coming out on November 14, which is super exciting. What can you say about the song in terms of its thematic quality, inspiration and creation?
The song is definitely very personal to me. Basically, I went through a breakup a couple months ago, and there are no enemies in the breakup. I tried to write a mature “no villains” kind of song because I feel like there are so many really sad or really angry songs about heartbreak, but I didn’t necessarily feel all of those things in that way. The song is about taking action, making it out, and allowing change to happen, even when that’s really difficult.
Thank you. That’s wonderful. How’d you record the song?
I recorded it solo, so it’s a stripped down song. It’s just synth guitar and my voice basically except for some percussion elements which were performed by the person who’s engineering the track.
In terms of this upcoming release, does that mean there is some more new music on the way? I know you guys play a lot of unreleased music.
Yeah, definitely. There’s music on the way. There’s always stuff cooking. But like I said, we’ve really focused on touring this past year. We have a couple of songs arranged, and are towards a bigger release and bigger recording session, but because of scheduling, we probably won’t be able to get to that for some time.
Well I’m excited for when that time comes. I have one last question. I love hearing artists talk about other works of art. Is there like a specific work of art that you felt has kind of influenced you throughout your life and shaped you as an artist?
I’ve always been a fan of animation and television in general, film, and all of that. I’ve always felt that if I didn’t really stick to songwriting, I might have gone into the film industry. I say that as if I couldn’t do that. Now, it’s just not like my focus, obviously. But yeah, I’ve always been a really big fan of cartoons and animation. I guess because it’s fall I’m thinking about Over the Garden Wall which also has really beautiful musical elements. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it.
I haven’t, no. I’ll have to check it out.
It’s really good. I watch it basically every November. It’s a Cartoon Network miniseries and it’s like 10 episodes that are 10 minutes long, but usually I watch it all at once. It’s like a modern day fairy tale.
I love that. Well, yeah, that is all I have for you. Thank you so much for talking with me today.
Yeah, thank you so much. These are really thoughtful questions. I appreciate that.
Yeah. I’m wishing you guys the best. I hope I can catch your show at TV Eye when you guys come here.
I hope you do too. That would be great.