Sunshine Forever Mine

There are tons of talented Indians who are making their mark on the map, and surely, for all the right reasons. So when Jatin Puri recently won the Best Music Video award for Life Is Good, at the International Songwriting Competition, we just had to know more about him.

With a formidable panel of judges, from Ozzy Osbourne to The Cure’s Robert Smith, from Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon to Run DMC and Massive Attack, the ISC is a platform for amateur and established songwriters/musicians to showcase their skills. An annual event that has given the top spot to Kimbra Johnson, more popularly known for her collab with Gotye in Somebody That I Used To Know, winning the ISC is a huge deal. Here’s our snappy one-on-one with musician, Jatin Puri.

If you had to pick three songs to describe your win at the ISC, which would you choose? Feeling Good by Nina Simone, Jump Around by House of Pain and Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz.

How did you come up with the concept for the music video, Life is Good? I had been following the SlumGods crew for a while and one of their representatives, Hera is a good friend of mine. So while I was thinking of doing a music video, I knew that it had to be something to do with those b-boys, coz they’re all really talented. One day the producer (Kartik Mahajan), the director (Abhijeet Chhabra) and I were just sitting and brainstorming and we came up with the idea of getting these kids to just listen to the music and react to it, similar to Fatboy Slim’s video Push the Tempo, but instead of going all crazy they’d bust some moves. So the original plan was actually to have them listen to the track on an iPod and pass that around randomly, but no one was really willing to sacrifice their iPod to be thrown around, so we decided to use another item to represent that and we thought a cap would be perfect. And then we just shot the video in the next two days.

Where was the video shot and on what camera? The video was shot in Hauz Khas Village on a 5D Mark II by Nishant Shukla.

Your favourite line from Life is Good? I quite like the first line of the chorus – ‘Here we go, double time, sunshine forever mine. Life is good when you see it from above’.

One thing that the world should know about you as an artist? Other than being an artist, I’m also a Jedi.

What’s next? I’m just working on a mix right now for an online magazine and that should be out soon. I’m going to be collaborating with a new minimal dubstep group called, The Pricks. I also plan on releasing an EP in the next few months. Quite busy, eh?_

By: Radhika Iyengar