The first time Soham Mukherji - one half of Indie music’s favourite producer duo, NEVERSOBER - saw an iPhone was when he was returning home from Goa in 2008. His mum, Radhika, had the first ever iPhone and he remembers looking at it with a mixture of incredulity and deep curiosity. He had never seen a touch-screen before and standing at an airport, he vividly remembers fiddling with the screen, swiping up and down.
“I couldn't comprehend that this was a phone - I thought it was a magic brick or something. I couldn't figure it out. She explained that it's a phone, but I still didn't understand. I was very confused by it . . . at this shiny new object. I must have been seven,” he grins.
He’s met with ‘woahs’, ‘that’s crazy’ and a ‘damn, respect mom, bro’ from his peers, Abhijay Sharma, Harjot Kaur, Rutvik Talashilkar and NEVERSOBER’s other half, Riz Shain. We are at Apple India’s office in Mumbai’s BKC, sitting in their ‘Music Room’ on a massive sofa.
It’s four in the evening, and in a few hours, the musicians will cross the business complex and head to the Apple store in Jio World Drive to participate in the brand’s first songwriter-focused ‘Today at Apple’ session in India - a collaboration with songwriter management and publishing company, Outwrite, focused on their creative processes and experiences working in the country’s music industry.
But for now, the five musicians look dreamy-eyed, having taken a step into the past to recollect their first ever interaction with an Apple device. For Kaur, it was the iPod Touch, which was quite an upgrade from the Discman that her dad had gotten her previously. Shain recalls making the jump from CDs to MP3s with the iPod Nano which he received on his birthday while Talashilkar shares that his first encounter with music production was on his dad’s Macintosh which ran Logic 9.
“I remember because Logic 9 used to look very weird, like a dark grey and green and I was like 13 or 14, mazze aa rahe hai - having fun, doing a production’. That’s when I was like ‘Apple, I’m committed now fully’,” he says, with a laugh.
For the five of them to now be participating in a Today at Apple session is, understandably, a big deal. However, according to them, this support from the tech and lifestyle giant has been pretty consistent in their professional journeys.
Abhijay Sharma shot to global fame in 2023 at the age of 20 with the viral hit Obsessed, but the first time he was featured on any editorial playlist was on Apple Music. “It was a crazy feeling just to be there on the curated playlists - back in 2023, I think our song (Obsessed) was the only independent song in India which was number 1 for more than 30 days in the country. We cut the cake here only in the Music Room,” he says, bashfully, as his peers in the room urge him to be a little less modest.
“I would always be like, how are they (Apple) so tapped in with what’s going on within the indie scene also? Anyone whom I can recommend as worth listening to or looking out for - especially in a country like India where there are hundreds of these people - all of them, at some point, have received some kind of reach-out or support from the brand which is not common at all,” says Mukherji, as Sharma adds that before he had larger streaming numbers, he couldn’t receive editorial support from any other platform.
The support also comes from the products themselves - which, if they are to be believed, are a godsend. Sharma and Shain cite Continuity Microphone as a favourite because it lets you use your iPhone to directly input notes into a Logic session, while Mukherji believes that Apple’s greatest feature is AirDrop.
“Plus the voice memos . . . the clarity especially, because I’m not even kidding, for all of us on projects that we’ve worked on, the final recordings have voice note recordings from guitars to vocals - even the final recordings for some Bollywood songs as well,” Kaur chimes in, as Talashilkar and Sharma geek out on the portability of the laptops, battery life and its ability to handle heavy sessions and recognise different sound cards natively, without needing to install separate drivers for each one.
For the musicians, the workshop they eventually took part in mattered because there was a time when they were just folks interested in music who didn’t know where to start. Talashilkar talks about how for the longest time, not many people knew what went into the actual making of a song, especially the songwriting and production process.
“I think having discussions like this opens the conversation up to people who are really interested in it. We lucked out in some ways by maybe finding the right person to give us their advice, but not a lot of people have the same privilege. When I was starting out, I would have definitely wished for something (like the Today at Apple Session),” he says.
The NEVERSOBER duo speak about how when they were starting out, they did have YouTube but that wasn’t as immersive as what they would be doing at the session, i.e. deconstructing their popular track Sanatan in Logic Pro.
“We can open up our entire session and show you each instrument and answer whatever questions you have regarding it. I would have killed for that,” he says.
Mukherji adds that he used to watch the behind-the-song videos on YouTube where “the music director would be there for like three seconds and I would pause and zoom into the dude’s laptop to check the plug-ins”.
Of course, now he knows that the busy-ness on the laptops was just for the camera and that folks would just throw plug-ins on the laptop and mess up the mixer to give an idea of what production really entails. And by the time the Today at Apple session ended on Monday evening, all the music enthusiasts in the room knew that too, along with a host of other important details.