Kristian Bent’s new single ‘My Anjuna’ is out now on Spotify and the Goa-based singer-songwriter is bursting at the seams for not just new music, but for everyone to journey with him to the backdrop of a new sound.
Three years after he released his first album, Campfire Stories, filled with 9 songs that spoke of love, of loss, longing and joy, stories based on his life thus far, Bent’s new single, My Anjuna, and his forthcoming EP (to be released towards the latter part of 2020), turns the mirror on himself. “The EP is a bit more objective in that I speak of depression, loneliness, loss. Though, still about myself, it’s open for people to place themselves as the protagonist. The sound, however, is me slowly trying to find my own sound. The grit and rawness of a distorted guitar come from the early UK rock, punk, the grunge days – something, especially the guitar tones, that I enjoy even now”.
”Since Campfire Stories came out, Kristian Bent went on a bit of a journey. He moved to Bengaluru a few months later and stayed there a year, playing at gigs across the city and also adding fresh experiences to his arsenal of stories, ready to be turned into song. One such microcosm of the city weaves its way into a song that will be on the EP.
My Anjuna though, while titled after one of Goa’s famous beaches and the location of many a Kristian Bent gig, isn’t about the geographic location but of a space, a room if you may, in one’s mind. The place you go to when the world and life gets a bit dark. This introspection wasn’t deliberate in a way. The regular gigs (Bent is the most followed singer/songwriter in Goa), the new experiences and the learning that came from performing his original music to fresh audiences, made the 31-year-old gain new perspectives on just about everything.
A fan of Ray LaMontagne and Chris Stapleton (“Chris has this ability to tell it like it is, in words that we’d normally use but in expressions, we couldn’t imagine), Kristian says he loves to write about love, “Not necessarily intimate, romantic love because there’s a lot else to love. Also because it’s the easiest thing to write about”.
When he’s not writing music or performing, Kristian Bent experiments with food. He took a short break from music to run a restaurant on a South Goan beach. “What I love about cooking is the instant gratification. The knowledge that when I’m done I will have closure and the result is final. With music you are almost always creating something very specific. With food, one can experiment and alter the process but the core presentation remains the same.”
His experimentation with his music, on the other hand, has begotten a new sound, forging a bridge between his earlier troubadour-led bluegrass folksy sound into something with a bit more grunge and bluesy drum lines.
Know more about the Kristian Bent, visit his official website www.kristianbent.com and Subscribe to his YouTube Channel