He is an architect and a consultant, a poet, a guitarist, and very interestingly, a lyricist and an amazing singer too! BTW speaks to Cyrus Vesuvala—a man who wears many hats, each one in style, and enchants his audience completely with his soulful, thought-provoking songs and poetry.
Tell us briefly about yourself, where you were born and brought up, and your educational and professional background.
I was born in Calcutta, India, in 1957, the second of three siblings and spent my school-going years there. I did my Architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and started my working career as an architect in 1980. Since then, I have worked in India, Oman and, for the past 22 years, in the Kingdom of Bahrain where I am the currently Executive Director in an Architectural & Engineering consultancy office.
How early in life were you initiated into music?
In Calcutta, we lived literally next door to the Calcutta School of Music. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of waking up early on Sunday mornings, to hear the orchestra tuning up and practicing, less than 20 meters away from our bedroom window.
My siblings and I were also very fortunate that a brilliant young American musician (and a very avant garde composer), John Cooper, had just come to India on a Fulbright scholarship and spent a year at the Calcutta School of Music, teaching children like us the theory of music: we really loved those weekly classes which included singing different kinds of music, and getting introduced to vocal harmonies, rounds, gospel music, etc.
When I was 15, I picked up an old guitar that had been lying about the house. It had actually been bought for my elder brother a couple of years earlier but he had given it up because it was a Hawaiian guitar (considered not at all cool, in those days!!) and he wanted to play rock. I was left handed: the guitar was right handed… and it was a Hawaiian guitar. But I was so determined to learn to play the guitar, that I figured out I first needed to reverse all the strings and remove the top nut. I then went to a friend who taught me my first few chords: C, D, F, G, E, Am, Em, Dm. I learned to play those reasonably comfortably, within a week and suddenly, with these 8 chords in my arsenel, literally dozens of songs started becoming playable. I’d always loved to sing and now I had the ability to accompany myself and sing songs that I liked and wanted to sing! Very liberating!!
In those days, of course, there was no Internet and there were no guitar tabs available, so we learned all our songs directly off the radio, listening intently, pen and paper in hand, trying to figure out the lyrics and the chords simultaneously.
How did you start composing your own songs?
My first ever composition came about very unexpectedly. I was idly strumming my guitar in my architecture college hostel room one afternoon in 1976, when the first lines of my first ever song just came to me. I can’t explain how or why, but suddenly, verse after verse of lyric was literally tumbling out of my head and I found myself struggling to keep up, writing it all down, so I wouldn’t forget anything. Over the course of that one memorable afternoon, I had my very first composition completed, with both, lyrics and music in place. I remember being very pleasantly surprised with the suddenness and ease with which it had all happened. And almost involuntarily!
Tell us about how you now go about creating your songs. Do you compose the lyrics first or is it that sometimes the notes haunt you so much that you need words for them?
It happens in several ways: usually the lyric and the melody come to me pretty much together. Other times, I have the melodic or chord structure worked out, but have only “placeholders” for lyrics. In such cases, it is not uncommon for the lyric to build up over a number of days, or weeks.
Do you ever collaborate with others?
I have collaborated with several other musicians in the US and Europe on songs, working sometimes as a lyricist for their music, sometimes as a musician for their lyrics. My primary requirement for any collaboration is only that I am able to “feel” my collaborator’s lyric or music, before I take it up.
In 2008, I collaborated with Billy Simons, a lyricist from the USA, on a song called “Living in a Postwar Dream“, about a traumatized WW-II veteran. I wrote the music for Billy’s dark lyric and performed and recorded the song. In Dec 2008, this song reached #1 on Neil Young’s “Living with War” anti-war website.
Shortly thereafter, I worked with Dominic McPolin, another lyricist and songwriter in Bahrain, to compose the music for and perform his emotive lyric “David and Goliath (Have you Ever?)” about the effects of war on the children of Gaza.
All of my music, including some the collaborations, can be heard and downloaded for free from my Soundcloud page www.soundcloud.com/psyve
Can you tell us about how you go about recording your songs?
I’ve been recording fairly regularly since 1980, first using just a normal cassette tape recorder and then graduating, in 1985, to my first multi-track recorder: a TEAC “Porta Studio” 4-track tape recorder. Multi-tracking opened up a whole new vista of opportunity for me, because now I was no longer limited to the one-vocal-one-guitar format: I could record a vocal and guitar, then come back and over-dub vocal harmonies, add a harmonica, add a bass line, add a counter-melody on keyboard, etc.
In 2007 I bought my current digital 12-track machine, a BOSS (Roland) BR1200 CD and re-recorded several of my songs. My recordings since 2007 are very “vocals driven”, closer to the sound of the original one-vocal-one-guitar format that I had started off with, with just a hint of harmonies and bass line. These are the recordings on my Soundcloud page today.
Cyrus the architect, Cyrus the singer and guitarist or Cyrus the poet. Which identity do you relate to most and why?
Outside of my professional career as Architect and Consultant, I probably see myself mainly as a “Singer-Songwriter”. Recent interaction with other poets and songwriters around the world has made me look at my own work differently: I realize that a lot of my lyrics could be classified as spoken-word poetry put to music: most of my songs are partly spoken, anyway…
Any plans to launch an album of your songs?
(LAUGHS) No plans to launch any album currently, though there is probably enough material ready today to fill three albums!
What is your message to aspiring songwriters of Bahrain?
Try to write about things you feel strongly about, or feel a connection to.
If you feel it, it will show in your work!