For an artist to make an impact with just their voice and a guitar, they must be something quite special. Luke Sital-Singh, a singer-song-writer from London, isn’t just another guy with a guitar: he’s taken acoustic folk music down a different route to create an impressive collection of stripped-back melodies with an aura of intimacy. Sital-Singh became a subject of hype and admiration in the music industry following the release of his first single ‘Fail for You’ in 2012, a powerful and alluring track which captured many, paving the way for him to achieve growing success with his undeniable musical talent.
St Andrews was lucky enough to have Luke Sital-Singh play a coffee house session on a rainy Friday afternoon in October, and before he impressed with a short but flawlessly performed set, I sat down with him to ask a few questions about how he started his musical career and how it has progressed.
How did you get into singing and song-writing, and who were your biggest influences growing up?
I’m not sure to be honest. I learnt guitar when I was about 11, but that was to play in a metal band with my friends. That sort of music, the likes of Slipknot, was the first kind of music that I really identified with. That didn’t last too long though. When the first Damien Rice album came out, that was the first time I’d heard a singer-songwriter, and I remember it really hitting me and thinking that that was what I wanted to do. It was as simple as that really! Growing up, we weren’t a massively musical family and my parents didn’t have amazing taste in music, so hearing Damien Rice opened up this whole world for me and I started listening to people like Paul Simon, Nick Drake and Bob Dylan.
So you released your first EP in 2012 and your most recent just in August 2015. How do you think your sound has changed between then and now?
There has definitely been a sort of journey with my music. I did 3 EP’s before releasing an album in 2014 (‘The Fire Inside’), and now I’ve released a 4thEP. The 3 first EP’s were similar: quite stripped and bare, and they were mostly recorded as just me performing the song with my guitar and adding subtle things. By the time it got to the album, it became a bit more ‘poppy’ and ‘full-bandy’. Looking back, along the way I think it’s lost some of the purity that I really liked and miss. So when it came to doing the 4thEP, I wanted to go back to the pre-album EP’s and try to get in touch with that sound a bit more. So the recent EP is more like my earlier stuff, but there is definitely a sense of progression as well.
A lot of your songs are quite heartfelt. What is your song-writing process and what do you find influences you to sit down and write a piece of music?
The process is so clumsy, really. I wish I could even call it a ‘process’ actually, most of the time it’s just a mess of instincts that come on really fast. Usually I’ll have one idea that I’ve been thinking about for a long time: maybe a perspective on something, a relationship, or even just an emotion…anything really. It will churn away in the back of my head for sometimes months almost unconsciously, and then I’ll sit down with the guitar and everything just tumbles out. My best songs have come out that way. If they don’t happen in one sitting, I’ll probably just not finish it – I’ve probably got about 10 albums worth of songs that are potentially good enough, but I just can’t finish them because the next day I might not be in the same headspace, or I don’t understand what exactly I was feeling at that point so I just think I’d rather start a new one.
Acoustic and folk music are really popular in the UK at the moment, with the likes of James Bay being massively successful. Where do you see yourself going with your music, what is your aim?
I’ve never been someone who has picked something to aim for, something like headlining Wembley that other artists might, and then worked to achieve that. I’m a bit of a pessimist, I just don’t think that sort of thing will happen. I’m just grateful to have got this far, I never really thought I would have achieved doing an album with a big label, having people come to my tours and sing along – that’s still amazing to me. So I think my big ambition, which doesn’t seem big at all, but I think it is in this day and age, is just to keep this a career. To still be going in 5 years or so is quite hard as an artist, usually you see people come about and then fade away within a couple of years. It’s hard to keep it going especially if you’re making a full time career out of this, so if I could still be doing this in 5 years I’d be really chuffed to be honest.
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