Earthkeeper: Pinkshift's New Punk Pop & Metalcore-Tinged Album Was Shaped By The Vedas

I think the best way to put it is that we’ve grown more into who we are as musicians! Our first couple records were written mostly before we ever toured, so going into writing for this one, we had a lot more experience playing live shows. We all grew a lot as musicians. For me, I learned how to scream. This opened up the band to a lot more opportunities for heavy moments, too. You can kind of see the transitional sonic shift in our EP from 2023, 'Suraksha'. That was when we first started playing around with heavier sounds. Paul switched to a baritone guitar for that project and it opened the door for lower tunings that better suited my vocal range. 

Lyrically, I focused on challenging myself to write for this record totally by hand, without writing tools like rhyme dictionaries or thesauruses. For our first record, I definitely was more chill about it — I used to just write in my notes app on my phone, and look up words to fit when I felt stuck. But this time I wanted to create bulletproof stories, where every single word was crafted and intentionally placed. The reason is probably my own reaction to the emergence and omnipresence of AI in our every day lives. I didn’t want my deeply human story to be diluted by technology for the sake of convenience, and with Earthkeeper I was very motivated to create a story that was as intrinsically human and authentic as possible. So all the lyrics I wrote came from my journals. The evolution of every song’s poem is written out by hand, with stories, drawings, and thoughts surrounding each iteration of the poems in my journals. I was only using sheets I wrote by hand to build and record melodies and rhythms with my vocals. By the time I was recording, I felt like I really understood the story through and through. This process made my performances on Earthkeeper some of my most authentic and emotional studio performances I’ve done.

I’ve kind of always wanted to be an artist, and I’ve been playing music for as long as I can remember. No one in my living family has much of a musical inclination, so I have always navigated the journey of artistry from a first-gen perspective. When I was really young my parents put me into piano lessons, and I would play piano for hours every day. I came home from school, sat on the piano, and I just wouldn’t get up. It was my own world to get lost in, and my mom really liked to sit and listen to me play. I was always performing in recitals, and when I got the chance to play in band in school, I joined every music club. I learned flute and piccolo for concert and marching band, played piano in jazz band, and in middle school I started composing my own pieces for piano and small ensembles with my friends. I’ve just always been obsessed with making music with people in new and different ways. 

Dance was equally a large portion of my life. I grew up learning Kathak, and the college Bollywood dance circuit became a huge part of my life as an artist. I loved performing, no matter what it was, honestly. Dance really gave me a lot of the structure and perspective on performance as a music artist, and has definitely shaped the way I perform today. It helped me become much more self aware of my presence on a stage and gave me the tools to shape it. Running a college dance team also had its impact. Dance and music has always been my “biggest distraction” ( as my mom would say). It’s such a gift that I get to pursue being an artist on stage in real life now as an adult. Music took over my life but it’s been a long time coming. 

Definitely! My parents both immigrated from India to America, and India has always been a huge part of my identity. I’ve been going back to India to visit my grandparents pretty much every year since I was really young. Growing up, some of my first real experiences playing music with groups of people were playing dhol for our community’s monthly bhajans and learning Kathak. On the other hand, I also grew up in Michigan — in a small town in the midwest where I was a minority of many intersections. I loved playing sports, and music was my life, even if I had to compete with whiteness constantly. I was always the odd one out, no matter what sphere I was entering, but both of these worlds really made me who I am. 

When I was in maybe 7th grade, I entered the school talent show – I decided to dance. So I wore my ghagra choli in the middle school gym, fully knowing I was literally the only Indian person in the whole school, and I danced to Madhuri Dixit’s song, 'Aaja Nachle'. I probably learned the song for some community function and it was the talent I felt would make me stand out. I knew that some kids at my school might think I was a freak, but I thought like, who cares? They’re talentless and generic for having that take. My dance was awesome and it’s something that I knew made me unique. 

So yeah, going into being a rock star — I really try to lean into who I am to create something no one has spoken to before here. There haven’t been so many opportunities for people like me to break into this space, and I’m excited to carve out what that looks like for me. Whenever I feel uninspired, I turn to my culture and my experiences to guide me forward. A lot of how I experience being nonbinary and queer is informed by the ideas of gender fluidity I grew up learning about in Hindu mythology. So much of the concept of Earthkeeper is an abstraction of ideas from the Hindu Vedas, Upanishads, and general teachings about our relationship with nature as humans. The lyrics take these teachings and apply them as solutions to the problems that we as a global society face today. For example, this line in 'Anita Ride' is inspired from the Gita: 

“become divine, if you never want you’ll always have / 

reincarnated, here i am / 

everywhere and in everything / 

i feel alive”

Every song I’ve written has been for therapy. Whenever I have written songs, they have always been tools to process things that I am struggling with personally, or may be struggling to understand the meaning of. Once I write the song, I feel better. That’s how I generally have always operated. Where a song ends up is really not up to me, it just sort of comes out to be exactly what it needed to be in that moment. And honestly, that’s everything a song is to me — a tool to process something that I struggle to name or validate. It sounds corny, but it’s always been a space where I know that I can listen to myself. Sometimes, I spend months to years trying to understand what a song I wrote is trying to tell me. When I write a song that’s good to me, I feel something click, and that feeling of validation gives me an emotional release. 

The songs I write are pretty basic, always have been. I write them on piano or (more recently) guitar. When I feel like the idea is whole, I have no real desire or vision to make it more complicated. I just send them to Paul and Myron, and that’s where my bandmates come in. I tend to feel attached to my riffs and chords but Paul adds to them in really creative ways. Myron adds a rhythm that accentuates the syllables. I always work together with them to craft something that fully realises the idea. And sometimes, one of them comes to the band with ideas that I take part in modifying. They both hear things in the songs I write that I may not have even realized. Our collaboration makes the songs so powerful. I really love collaborating with such talented people, Pinkshift songs wouldn’t be the same without all three of us.