Last year was a busy and exciting time for singer-songwriter Prateek Kuhad. He has just returned from his largest international tour to date in collaboration with a Zee Live IP, Supermoon Music. From October to December, Prateek played 30 shows across three continents and travelled to cities in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain. Prateek is also about to finish an 11-city India tour. The last of the shows for the tour is in Bengaluru on January 22. Apart from this, he has one more confirmed tour in Dubai on January 24, which is probably his last public show for a while before he dives into working on a new record.
Perhaps the biggest high of the year was former US President Barack Obama listing Prateek’s ‘cold/mess’ as one of his favourite songs of 2019. “Needless to say, this gets me a lot of eyeballs. My goal is to spread my music as far and wide as I can, and Obama is a very well-known personality. Apart from that, it’s really supercool because overall he’s a really nice guy and a good human being,” he says ecstatically. The song was released as part of JioSaavn’s Artist Originals programme making it the first Indian Independent Label to have made it to the list which includes artists from around the globe. Prateek is the only Indian singer-composer to have featured on the list.
According to the 29-year-old, the US leg of the tour was a bit of a milestone, because this time, he played at 10 cities in some of the biggest venues in the country—with a capacity of 600 to 1,000. His show at San Francisco was sold out with 1,000 people attending. In Europe, he had solo shows in smaller venues with a capacity between 100 and 200.
In London, he performed at the 800-capacity Islington Assembly Hall, and travelled for his first-ever shows in Birmingham and Manchester. “It was a beautiful and pretty iconic venue, a thousand-capacity show that we sold out again,” he beams happily. Prateek also debuted in cities such as Paris, Antwerp, Madrid and Barcelona, where he played at the legendary venue, Razzmatazz. Further, shows in Berlin, Cologne and Amsterdam rounded up his seven-city European tour. The set-list spanned his work from 2013 until now, promising a special experience for his fans, both in India and across the world.
Primarily a self-taught musician and songwriter, Prateek believes he is a songwriter and studio musician first and a performer second. “I’d rather spend a week cooped up in the studio than a week playing shows,” he says. He also admits that there is no real process to his songwriting. “I let it happen as instinctively as possible. Sometimes, I’ll start writing a song and work on it bit by bit where it ends up taking several months. At other times, a whole song flows out in 15-20 minutes,” he explains.
According to Prateek, the indie music space in India right now is at the cusp of an interesting transition. Funnily enough, this musician failed guitar class in high school. When he took up private sessions to pass guitar class in school, he ended up becoming obsessed with it. While he has mostly written on the guitar, he started playing the piano for the first time two years ago. It has now become his preferred instrument to write songs on.