Exclusive Interview: Zeshan B On "Melismatic," Brown Power, and Social Transformation
Zeshan B gets real about mental illness and the millennial condition in an exclusive interview for his new album.
Last week, we premiered Zeshan B's single "Only in My Dreams." Today, the musician and activist dropped Melismatic, his stunning sophomore LP.
The term "melismatic" refers to an ancient style of singing in which a single syllable of text is sung across many notes. It's commonly seen in traditional music of East Asia and the Middle East, as well as in Gregorian chants and gospel. It makes sense that Zeshan—who uses his one voice to seamlessly transverse multiple genres and emotions and to speak out against many interlocking forms of oppression—would use it as the title of his album.
Highlights include the exuberant "Higher," which stands out as a tribute to the power of unity and rising above destruction. Laden with guitar solos and piano riffs, it's as much a celebration of music as it is a call to action. Other highlights include "Brown Power," already the recipient of a stunning video that features luminaries like Dr. Cornel West, Ilhan Omar, and many more. The closing track, "Freefall," is also a profound and cathartic exploration of the deepest pits of depression and raw emotion, but the music sounds more like flying than falling. In a world where so many of us experience depression and mental illness alone, the song stands out as an honest description of inner chaos, but it's also full of forward motion that hints at a deeper strength.
We spoke about the story behind the songs, as well as the web of interconnected forces that inspired his new album.
Melismatic
Warning: This interview contains mentions of suicide and death.
I would love to hear some more about your new single, "Only In My Dreams."
ZESHAN B: 2019 was a really heavy year for me. I was already struggling with insomnia and major depression. My best friend had committed suicide, and it was very difficult to cope with that, and with the enormous cascade of grief and regret, and with feeling like I wasn't there for him. This was my best friend in college, and I had a falling out with him that didn't quite get resolved before his death. I still live with so much guilt over that, and it's hard to put it in context, but just four years ago his own brother was shot and killed in Chicago. It was a very Chicago story of gun violence and gangs—this kid was just walking home from the grocery store and got held up, and was shot and killed. It's hard to talk about the death of my friend without speaking of his brother. It's really hard to unpack all of that. It's hard to describe the overwhelming nature of it.
The irony of it all is their family at the time lived in Pakistan, and when his brother was shot and killed in 2014, I arranged for his brother's body to be sent to Pakistan for the burial; that's what his family wanted. I went and spent time with his family there and five years later, here I am doing the exact same thing. I went to Pakistan and made this what I felt was a grief pilgrimage there to pay my last respects to him. That was at the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. I felt like I was frayed at the edges; I couldn't sleep. I just felt like I was sleepwalking through life.
By that point, it had been three years of being in this twilight zone of the Trump presidency. There were the Senate hearings around Bob Mueller and, of course, the impeachment, and nothing came of any of it… And it felt like things were going from bad to worse. My dreams were very weird then. It was very strange. I would have these nightmares. If I ever did get any sleep, I'd get these very vivid, horrific dreams, and I'd wake up in a cold sweat and I wouldn't want to go back to sleep.
Amidst all that, I was seeing the enormous disparities and inequality all around me in America. I live in Baltimore currently, and this is a city that is well-known for the despair of the drug trade. Once I saw a shooting in front of my apartment, two kids; they must have been teenagers just shooting at each other.
I think of it like a cloud, a hazy fog I felt like I was walking through, but if there's anything that came out of it, it was this song. I sort of poured my heart out into it. It's so personal. This song really is my favorite on the entire album. If there are any of the songs I'm really proud of, it's this one. It's so real to me, so visceral. I love the music and the way we produced and arranged it. I love the the artwork, too. It was done by one of my oldest friends from childhood, a friend from when I was 8 to 9 years old. Her name is Francesca Gabrielle, and she's this amazing visual artist. She saw my releases coming out, and she reached out to me. We rekindled our friendship, and started working together. It's interesting; she was there for me at a time when I moved to a very white area, and I was not used to being in a white area. She was the only white kid who would associate with me, who would sit with me at lunch, who was nice to me. Now we're leaning on each other in a time like this, and how appropriate for this song.
Sounds like a lot of heaviness for you and a lot of weight to put in a song. It's always amazing to me how music seems to appear at these end-of-the-road times; like just when you think you've hit the end, there's music. Has that been a theme for you?
I've noticed that. I felt like I got to a good place in the summer and early fall of 2019. I figured out I had severe sleep apnea—I basically couldn't breathe when I was sleeping. I was suffocating. It was almost like my grief was suffocating me. Once I got treated for that things started to change. Things felt a little bit lighter, and I think that one thing I've realized throughout all this is the one thing that propped me up at a time like that–and certainly at a time like this during this pandemic–is music.
I struggle getting out of bed. It's tough to be out of work right now; it's tough to be not doing and not being able to do what I do. This goes into mental health, and it's so important that we address these things. I hate how taboo it is. I think it's getting better; I think people are more and more open about going for therapy and getting medication.
I've been lucky to have had my wife who's a doctor and takes mental health extremely seriously and looks at it the same way you would look at diabetes or cancer. It's a real thing and it affects your body and your mind, and yet somehow we don't have 5K runs for depression. NFL players don't wear some stupid pink-colored glove to commemorate it. They should; I think it should be blue. [Laughs] But we don't have that as a society. It's not legitimized. I hope we get to that place.
The one thing that's been propping me up, that's keeping me going, is this slight glimmer of idealism, this belief that somehow the human spirit—and karma, and putting good into the world and putting good vibes into the universe—will only result in a positive atomic energy. I think it's that bit of flower-child idealism that is keeping me afloat now. Otherwise I think I would be committed. [Laughs] And I'm not alone. Last year, at this time, I felt alone. Who else do you know whose best friend commits suicide, and only four years earlier his brother was killed, and his brother was like my little brother… That's sort of a unique catastrophe, and I felt alone in that. At least this year I'm not alone. And that's why I think it's so important to talk with each other, to engage with each other.
BROWN POWER--Zeshan B (Official Video)www.youtube.com
You're definitely not alone. But also I think a lot about how there's so much unnecessary grief among people; and that has to be connected to some larger systems. It can't just be people making this stuff up in their own heads. There are larger forces at work, and I feel like an awareness of those forces is present in all the music of yours that I've heard.
Well, thank you; I'm glad it resonated. When Bill Withers died, I was such a wreck. This was somebody who was one of my biggest, if not biggest, musical idols, someone who was the soundtrack of my childhood. I always felt like his music was something I could latch onto when I wasn't feeling so well. It spoke to me.
I've always wanted to put out music that anybody can relate to. I don't have a target audience. I don't have a myopic view of how music should be made or who it should be marketed to. I just don't give a sh*t about stuff like that. It's about what's honest and what tells the truth.
I'm lucky to have whatever support I have had over the years. No pandemic is going to stop me from continuing on this musical journey. Right now, it's the only thing that gets me out of bed. There's my cat, too. My wife and my cat… They're also very important forces in my life.
I've also gotten so much great advice and insights from the elders around me, who honestly saw so much worse than I have over my life. I've been depressed, I've had loss, but my grain shop didn't burn down in the partition of 1947 in India (like my grandparents'). My neighborhood wasn't hit by riots. I didn't have to go into hiding in my ancestral village like Mom and dad did. I didn't have to migrate to a different country with a few dollars in my pocket.
I remember my dad telling me: "You know what the problem with you is? You don't enjoy your misery. You need to enjoy it a lot more." There was something very Buddhist about that, even though we're not Buddhist. It was like, the core of existence is suffering, so embrace it. It's like, just enjoy the parade. That's kind of like what I think we do as musicians. I deal with a lot of stage fright and I don't really let it show, but going on stage is almost like an out-of-body, traumatic experience for me. I need to decompress when it's all over. I keep asking myself, why do I keep doing it? And I think it's what my dad said—you gotta enjoy the misery. I really only sing sad songs, but I take joy in that misery. That's what's interesting about performing music.
That's also something that's so hard about the pandemic right now. I can put out music and turn people onto it, but I can't do that thing that I've always enjoyed the most, and that's performing for people in front of them. I just did a mini concert for Men's Health Magazine for mental health awareness month. It was a partnership for the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and I also did a home concert for Lincoln Center lately, and both were crazy because I had no idea what was going on on the other end.
Being a musician is by nature a very difficult life. It's not for the faint of heart. I think you have to kind of enjoy your misery a little bit. Right now, I don't have as much to distract myself, and I'm being forced to recognize the pain inside me that I was either ignoring or distracting myself from with the day-to-day humdrum. I'm being forced to deal with my feelings. I think a lot of people are, and I think it's really important that we reconcile ourselves with those innermost thoughts. We need to lean on each other, too.
This is definitely a confrontational period of silence for many people. There's an interesting contrast between all the terrible things that are happening, but also the ways people are going inward and asking—if we don't want to go back to the world we had before, both in terms of personal and larger-scale issues, how can we use this to go to a different kind of future?
I think in order to enact the social and political change that as a society we desperately need, we need to channel empathy. Apathy and dystopia and cynicism have been the order of the day. It's like we're in a spiritual blackout, and it has everything to do with why this monstrous human being is in the Oval Office right now, and it has everything to do with this kleptocracy in the Republican Party.
It has a lot to do with why popular music now is becoming more and more vacuous. One of my favorite public figures is Dr. Cornel West, and he says it so well—and I was really honored to have him in my music video "Brown Power"—he says the kind of music that comes out today will titillate your body but it won't stir your soul. And why is that? Because as a society, empathy and tenderness levels are low. Why is it that we don't care about those who have less than us? What does that say about us? I think we should hold society accountable for how the most vulnerable are treated and how the most downtrodden are treated.
I do have hope for us millennials. People think we're spoiled and entitled, but we are literally the first generation of Americans who have it worse than our parents. When I got out of college, it was the start of the Recession. Now there's this coronavirus thing. There's no American dream for us, no piece of the pie for us. I think we're going to be a strong generation, and we're going to enact some amazing changes. I am proud of my peers, and I'm proud of my generation. I want us to empathize, and I want us to hold each other to a higher standard. That's what I try to do with my music.
I definitely think the apathy you were talking about also seems connected to the mental health crisis. Maybe they're similar symptoms of a larger sickness. It's cool to hear people putting that out in the open more and more, and I think that as there's more apathy, it seems there's this growing desire among younger generations to actually change things.
We're more open about our mental health, about getting what we need, about advocating for equality and for justice. For me, being an artist and having my palm on the pulse of that is its own sort of story, but in terms of public health, having my wife being a resident doctor—she's on the front lines of COVID and just crushing it—has provided a fascinating perspective over the years. She has made me very aware of the disparities in health and in healthcare provided to, or not provided to, minorities, particularly blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. We're now finding out that COVID is disproportionately affecting communities of color that don't have access to technology and quality healthcare.
I've been very strident about those themes in my music, and I think that our generation's gonna be the one to kick down the doors. I don't think I'll sit on the sidelines. I really want to be a part of that, and my wife does too, and a lot of our peers want to be a part of it, and that's invigorating to be around.
I want to ask about the glimmer of idealism you mentioned at the beginning. What does that look like to you?
There is a silver lining, a glimmer of idealism that's still coursing through me and keeping me going. I guess the glimmer in part comes from the fact that I'm seeing more representation in government—people of color and people of different sexual orientation are starting to get a seat at the table. We're getting there and we're getting ours, despite all the haters, despite all the people out there who are working day and night to thwart us and to delegitimize us.
That's what my song "Brown Power" is about, and that gives me hope for the future. I'm seeing more and more interracial relationships, and more and more people from the LGBTQ community who live openly. The homophobia that existed when I was in high school is so much less than it was. The kids in Florida, fighting for gun legislation in Parkland, gave me a lot of hope. The generation after me is already post-racial; they're so much more fluid, and they don't have so much of the baggage that cats like me grew up with.
That gives me a lot of hope. As a society we're also becoming more aware of the impact we're having on the planet. I'm talking about our generation—not the baby boomers. My dad, who's a baby boomer himself, said to me, "You know, we failed you." I kind of appreciated that somebody from that generation would admit to the fact that [his generation] did whatever the hell they wanted—they destroyed the earth, destroyed the economy, screwed people over. I think that we're learning from their mistakes. We're becoming more aware of climate change, and we're not immune to logic and reason and science. And that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
And all I can do is just do my part and have high expectations for others. That's something that sometimes is hard to do, because when you see the swath of stupidity that exists in a lot of humanity, it's like, oh my god...but expecting more from other people and having high expectations through my fear gives me hope and keeps me going.
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