Universal Buzz Exclusive Interview with One AM Radio frontman Hrishikesh Hirway

1.Lets start off with your name. How did you come up with the name One AM Radio?

When I was growing up, my mom worked the closing shift at Sears at the mall near our house. She’d finish at 9:30pm and I would go with my dad to pick her up. We’d sit in the parking lot, me half-asleep in the back seat, listening to my dad listen to the radio. Sometimes the Celtics game, sometimes these old radio serials they’d re-broadcast. Something about the sound of AM Radio stayed with me as a soundtrack for late hours. Fifteen years later, one of the first recordings I made was a 4-track cassette for my sister and a few friends. It was instrumental, these guitar duets. They were supposed to be lullabies, listened to at night, going to sleep. (I’ve always listened to music while falling asleep.) I over-dubbed these fragments of radio programs, floating in and out of the songs. I really liked the intersection of the two meanings of “AM” and I labeled the tapes, when I gave them out, as The One AM Radio. As I started doing my solo stuff with a little more focus, I decided to keep that as the name for it.

2. How long have you been writing music? Performing Live as One AM Radio?

The first time I wrote a song was my senior year of high school, when I was 17. I started playing as The One AM Radio a couple years after that.

3. What is the craziest thing that has ever happened to you while touring?

People have asked me this before. I don’t think I have anything that lives up to the description “crazy,” not insofar as I imagine it: being invited to party in secret, darkened, smoky dens of iniquity, or getting arrested and thrown in a squad car, only to discover it was all an innocent case of simply mistaken identity. (It was a different Hrishikesh Hirway they were after all along!)

4. This is your third album. When recording this album, did you do anything different on it that you have not done in the past?

I think I tried very hard to think of it as an album from the beginning. Before, the songs came along, and only when I had enough to finish a record did I start to consider how they’d fit together as a whole. This time, I really wanted to make something cohesive, and I considered the pace and structure of the entire thing very early on.
5. Were you listening to any artists (new or old) while recording this album that influenced the music on your new album?

I think I end up being influenced in some way by all the records I hear. The new ones I was listening to a lot at that time were by 13 & God, A.C. Newman, Broadcast, M83, My Morning Jacket, and Sigur Ros. The old ones were by Bach, Gorecki, and Asha Bhosle.

6. Being on the road alot, what are some of the clubs you enjoy playing the most while on tour?

My favorite venues definitely tend to not be clubs, but ones that stray a bit from the conventional venue format. The Coolidge Corner movie theater in Boston and Dwight Chapel, an old church on the Yale University campus, are perennial favorites.

7. Are there any musicians or producers you would enjoy working with if you had the opportunity?

There are a lot of producers I really admire, whose work I try and learn as much as possible from. It’s a long, long list, but the first names that come to mind are Nigel Godrich, Questlove, Dave Fridmann, Jim O’Rourke, Timbaland, Mark Bell, and Jon Brion.

8. When you are not writing, recording, or performing, what do you enjoy to do the most in your offtime?
I play a mean game of Boggle.

9, Alot of people worry that because of the internet and digital music, the traditional idea of the album is going to die. Your thoughts.

I think it’s already died. Its ghost is kicking around and will continue to for a while, but most new music listeners could care less about music in any physical sense. For me, the artwork and packaging are a very significant part of my overall understanding of and experience with a record – but I’ll be in the vast minority in a someday that rapidly approaches.
10. If you were asked to curate a music festival where you asked to get one artist/band from the 1950s, one from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980's, 1990's and this decade (dead or alive, together or broken-up) who would those six artists be?

50s: Miles Davis circa 1958, when Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly were in his band
60s: the young Asha Bhosle
70s: Nick Drake
80s: Minor Threat
90s: Neutral Milk Hotel
00s: The Books (who put on the best show I’ve ever seen when they played in LA in 2005)