Anoushka Shankar's Personal Best

BEST FIT: You’ve chosen one of those songs for your next pick, “Traces of You”, a track you co-wrote with Nitin and which ended up being the first single from the album. What’s special about this one for you?

ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: I think it's just got a real sweetness to it. A lot of light, a lot of positivity.

The lyrics come from a poem I'd written that was quite a bit longer, in which I was really just trying to express a feeling of longing… for divinity, I guess, or some sort of spiritual connection, or whatever it may be. I was kind of writing towards that energy of feeling the essence of divinity everywhere, and I wanted to write it not as something like a prayer but more like a letter, which is a more intimate thing, and Nitin helped me to refine that.

The sitar you hear on the track was recorded in a single first take. I'd played it just to use as a reference for ideas, thinking I would go back and recompose it later. But by the time we’d recorded everything else we’d become so attached to that first take that we ended up keeping it. And then Norah came and sang.

As you know, our father passed away during the making of the album, and when it came out everyone kind of assumed that this song was about him. It’s funny, really, because the other two vocal songs on the album [“The Sun Won’t Set” and “Unsaid”] are more directly about him, whereas “Traces of You” speaks to something a bit broader.

Of course, because it’s quite broad, people can read into it in many different ways. It could be about loss or it could be romantic, or prayerful. It could be almost anything.

You and Norah had collaborated before this, but not in such a close-knit way. Do you think that having taken so long to work together like this made the experience somehow even sweeter?

I do, and it felt like the right time. I think we were both in a place of comfort and confidence in our own music-making, and it was nice that we worked on a few songs because we got to do things in different ways.

She sang on two songs that I’d co-written with Nitin – this song and “The Sun Won’t Set”, which I developed a little bit with her. The third song, “Unsaid”, she and I wrote together on the day before we went into the studio. I wrote the lyrics on a plane and she helped me to put it to music, so we got to experience writing together for the first time. It just felt very natural and organic at that point.

Right. I remember Norah saying that although you both come from quite different musical worlds and different inspirations, the two of you had an innate understanding of each other and the communication was so easy.

Yeah, and it’s a good comment because I think that sometimes, with this kind of music, the amount of effort involved can become sort of invisible. Which is the whole point, of course. It should feel natural and easy by the time other people get to listen to it. But in order for it to be easy, there’s usually a lot of work involved.

Norah is obviously an incredible musician and calls herself a serial collaborator, and I’m a serial collaborator too. I’ve been working across different traditions for so long that when I come to the point where I’m sitting with someone from another music tradition, I’m not just sitting there with my sitar and a classical understanding of music. I’m sitting there with all the experience of the different genres I’ve experimented with or at least had to understand a bit about, and an open mind about how to approach my instrument in a way that’s not the way I was taught.

So, yes, you can definitely sit with someone and be like "Wow, that was a really intuitive, natural moment," but I think it all really just comes from the depth of your experience up to that point.

With Norah’s involvement, and as the first single from the album, “Traces of You” got quite a lot of attention. What kind of journey did this song go on for you in terms of the way it was received?

It’s interesting, because now it really has a piece of my heart. My band and I will still play it every now and then, and it always feels really sweet. I like that it can take a lot of different shapes and iterations. It can be a beautiful instrumental piece, but it can also work with different kinds of singers, and I’ve had some perform it with me.

I did get a little sick of performing it after the album came out, and that’s because it’s one of those rare songs that we tend to play through in mostly the same way. A lot of my work has enough space to improvise or expand within the song, or at least change the song enough so that it doesn’t become too boring on a big, long tour. I wasn’t really used to the pop approach of just playing a song as it is. Now that it’s been years since that tour, though, playing it feels like a pleasure.

You recently went on Norah’s Playing Along podcast and revisted this song together. How was that experience for you?

It was gorgeous! I found it so interesting that I started playing it in the same bouncy way as the recording arrangement but she had a slightly more weighted tempo, so we ended up doing this unplanned, slightly more stripped down version. It brought out a poignancy that I'd never really heard in the song before.

It’s interesting because I've had a couple of people say to me that it felt like you could hear that we'd come back to that song a whole decade later, bringing a whole decade’s more experience to it. I don't know if I'd go that far, but it was definitely a different shade and it felt really beautiful.