Indie Spotlight: Pravin Thompson

Hello, Pravin! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today! For those who aren’t familiar with you and your music, give us an introduction to the Pravin Thompson experience.

     Welp! I guess I’d describe my music as taking melodies from early 2000’s emo bands, force them to take a class on jazz harmony, then make them listen to movie soundtracks and Ravel string quartets until they cry (even more), then kidnap Tools drummer and bassist. Add a Rom-Com somewhere in that mix and there you have it! The Pravin Thompson experience!

I read in your bio that you started playing music at the age of 10! What was your experience growing up playing music like?  

     I started taking formal lessons at age 10 after observing my older brother playing guitar for years! I was also super super interested in playing with people, and trying to write music with others. My guitar teacher had a background in Jazz and taught me how to improvise and utilize scales and chord variations at a pretty young age. I did choir, Jazz band, and marching band in school.

 Outside of that was writing my sad emo boy songs, until a friend of mine (who is actually my current drummer!) was in college for music, and exposed me to the album, “Miles Smiles” by Miles Davis and “Gently Disturbed” by Avishai Cohen. After those two albums I was super hooked on jazz and spent the latter half of High School trying to find as many opportunities to play and I stumbled upon a local jazz jam session. 

When I was 17 I was hired for my first steady gig in Philadelphia at a bar called the Tritone. I was hired by a drummer named Leo Gayten, who unfortunately passed away back in 2013. Leo let me experiment fully with weird sounds that I picked up from all the rock and ambient music I’ve been listening to. The other members of that band, all seasoned Philadelphia based R&B musicians, did not hesitate to let me know when I sounded bad! I got my butt kicked, but it was super important for me. I had also started a band with a few friends from High School that was actively trying to mix Jazz,  Sad boy emo Rock, and some Prog influences. Having that ability to be so creative was super important especially before going to college. Music School was great but a much more rigid type of learning, and application of Jazz. 

Being a New York jazz musician living in Brooklyn sounds like a romanticized storyline out of an indie film! But we all know that being an independent musician is actually quite a harrowing journey. Despite all the challenges that come with the indie life, when did you know you wanted to pursue music as a career regardless of those challenges?

    That’s actually really interesting because I feel like I’ve gone through many different stages of what the pursuit of a musical career looks like. When I was 16 I knew I wanted to make music a bigger part of my life, nothing else really mattered to me. When I was in college I was training to be a working musician and started to teach guitar. Then when I graduated I was primarily teaching guitar, playing church gigs, wedding gigs, musicals, and a lot of different types of things to pay my rent. So at that point I did accomplish the full-time working musician goal, and I was miserable because I wasn’t doing anything creative and original! That lasted about 4 or 5 years, then I quit all my music jobs to work at a farmers market for a year and a half. I was totally ready to hang it up… But even after being battered and bruised by the working musician industry, I still wanted to play. I started taking my band more seriously in 2017, and only took on projects I found inspirational and creative. So I suppose in this latest iteration of what a music career is; 2017 is when I started to pursue music as a career!

     I began writing the music for this album all the way back in late 2015. I wrote about 5 or 6 songs, and then finished up another batch in 2017-2018. This album is essentially about my New York transition, and the experiences I had in that transition. I walked into New York with an expectation about how my life is going to be, and I watched that get completely flipped on its head. I thought I would be happy playing as many gigs as possible (sometimes up to 15-20 a month!), but I was completely miserable and burning out. The album title, “A Thoughtful Collapse,” is referring to this slow 4-5 year process of me giving up my old expectations and ideas of what my career is supposed to be, and what it was like living within that duality. Which is why a lot of the direct compositional inspirations were coming from current comic book characters I was into. The idea of someone having to live a double life, and how someone exists within that tension is very interesting to me. Not trying to compare myself to Spider-Man, but that feeling of a greater calling while you are fighting with what you thought your life was supposed to be. And the sacrifices made during that time.

Releasing this album in 2020 had to be an interesting experience! What was the rollout of this album like? How did 2020 change your release plans for this project?

 A little birdy told me you have a new project in the works, titled Celestial! Tell us a little about this new project and what’s ahead for you this year.

     Yay! So Celestial is a 3 track EP that I’ve worked on throughout the quarantine. A big change for me during lockdown was learning how to do home recording and learning about the world of production! I am a SUPER NOOB to that! Most of my career has been just doing live recording with the full band, but it was really exciting to record this music and try to keep it feeling alive even though we all recorded separately! 

Since we were remote I was able to open up collaboration with a friend of mine named Lorena Del Mar! We used to play together all the time until she relocated to Belgium several years ago. Another amazing Singer on the album is Sivan Arbel, who I have been playing with for several years and this is the first time she has recorded on a project. 

I am excited to release this and see how it’s accepted and open up a whole new channel of my creativity. For a very long time I always felt like I needed the entire band polished and ready for everything. But now I can sit in my bedroom and work on recording music and producing, which is blowing my mind!  

With the lessons learned from your Thoughtful Collapse release, how will that impact your marketing plans for Celestial?

     One thing I have learned is patience! I created deadlines prematurely which forced me to rush certain things. One reason we haven’t set a release date yet is because we are still working on creating every single piece of content that will be associated with this release. Everyone is working slower because of the pandemic so I have been incredibly patient with this release. I’m hoping to have it out by the Spring! But no real promises yet. =)

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