Keep Your Eyes on the Road
A Conversation with Quiet Light’s Riya Mahesh
Photo by Leah Blom
Interview by Cadence Baker
Early this November, I sat down with a cup of tea and talked with Riya Mahesh, the Texas-born, Boston-based artist behind the experimental electropop project Quiet Light. Riya called me over dinner on the East Coast, and we talked about experimental creation, making your own rules, driving for hours, and getting anyone to listen to your music in the first place.
Cadence
I know you had primarily used Logic for music production in the past. Do you still use Logic, or are you on a different program now?
Riya
I'm pretty much a devout Logic user. A lot of people think that I use Ableton because I'm that electronic pop-type vibe. But I’ve just been using Garageband since I was a kid, and Logic feels so easy for me.
Cadence
In listening to your production, I see an inclination towards certain sounds and sensibilities. I hear a lot of organic sound, obviously, and a lot of sound collage-y stuff going on; a lot of these shimmering, expansive synths and arps. Even in the drum programming, there's a Quiet Light style that's developing more and more each project. Do you notice that you gravitate towards any trademark production techniques?
Riya
Thank you for noticing that! I think that the albums change a bit in terms of style, but there are some trademarks that remain constant. The [production choice] that people know me the most for is the voice memos. There are a handful of really heavy voice memos, but for the most part, they're pretty light—voice memos of my friends talking about pasta shapes and conversations on trains and public transportation. On the newest record, I had run out of concepts for the voice memos and felt I had taken it to a point where I wanted to leave it. I think 'Love90’ is the only song on the record that uses voice memos, and [they are used] very intentionally. I only used five voice memos, and I layered them one on top of the other. I have this one song called ‘You Know That I've Stayed’, and I use the same technique of layering voice memos on each other in an orchestra-type way.
I love that you noticed the drums. It's trap drums, honestly. I just really like them because I think it's cool to bridge genres. On ‘Paloma', there's trap drums, and on my old song, ‘Montreal’, as well. I feel like there are more trap drums on the new music that I'm working on now, [whereas] it was something that I peppered in before.
Cadence
Yeah. And then ‘Love90’ almost sounds a little bit breakbeat-y.
Riya
Oh, a lot of breakbeats for sure, too.
Cadence
I'm a big breakbeat person. I also played ‘Love90’ recently on my radio show, actually, I wanted to tell you.
It’s cliché to [describe your music as] genre-bending, because I think most good music nowadays is. But it's a very natural-sounding genre-bend. It sounds like you really employ all of your influences in your music, which ends up creating a much more unique product than creating only within one specific genre.
Riya
I agree; it’s more natural. I'm a little bit ADHD with my songs, moving around a lot, and I believe in the idea of surrendering control to the recording process. You can go into the studio and think to yourself, “I want to make a song that sounds like Sade”, and then come out having made something so vastly different. I really try to trust my gut as much as I can, and surrender any preconceived notions I had about what the song was going to sound like. Sometimes you go in wanting to make a shoegaze song, and it ends up not being shoegaze, and that's okay.
I think that within a record there should be some cohesiveness, but I do like when artists do different genres in one record.
Cadence
When you're doing the track list, are you trying to make each song segue into the next, or are you trying to hit listeners with a left turn?
Riya
It's definitely a mix of both. There are artists that are ‘singles’ artists, and there are artists that are ‘album’ artists. I've never really been a ‘singles’ type girl. I've always been obsessed with the concept of making a project; maybe the individual songs are not as strong as singles, but the album as a whole is strong because the songs work together. That's been my ethos. It's all about trying to tell a story with the album, trying to convey a concept. There are so many concept albums these days because pretty much everything you can think of in music has already been done. The only thing you can really do is just be true to your own style, and whatever inspirations come along with it. But then, in addition to that, you can tweak the concept each album.
Going Nowhere is an album about being directionless, feeling lost. The tracklist takes you through what it's like to drive on the highway; you’ve been driving for two hours and your destination is three hours away, but the last hour, you've been on the road for so long that you’re on autopilot. That's what the album sounds like. By the time you get to the last song, it’s so personal and meditative, you know, it just fits right there in that track order.
Cadence
I can definitely see that with Going Nowhere. Man, I have to do a lot of driving up and down the coast to get home; I'm from LA, so I’m about six hours away. There's a lot of those autopilot hours, but I still really like how peaceful that drive can be. I'm definitely going to recontextualize Going Nowhere by listening when I'm driving home next week.
Riya
Yeah, it's definitely a car album. I love that you’re from California; I'm from Texas, and when I was driving home from college it would take four hours. One of the primary ways that I listened to music was on those long drives I had to take to get anywhere. So a lot of music that I make now is the type of stuff I would want to listen to if I was on a drive.
Cadence
I would imagine our drives are kind of similar—the long expanses of desert highway.
Riya
I also just love the concept of driving through America. It's just one country, but there are so many different natural landscapes; the East Coast looks so different from the West Coast, and the South looks so different from Montana. The imagery of driving through America listening to quasi-electronic music has been a really interesting concept for me. Paris, Texas-core.
Cadence
I don't know why I had never thought about your music in that context, because it seems so obvious to me now that [the driving motif] is a big influence.
Riya
I don't do that many interviews and I don't really have a press team or anything, which is kind of good in its own way. I want people to form their own connections to the music.
Cadence
Yeah, definitely. Some of my favorite albums are pretty cryptic—Blonde, for instance. The tiny glimpses of the real meanings that I get, I find really valuable. But do you think Frank Ocean would go online and be like, ‘Hey guys, this is what ‘Ivy’ is about”? He doesn't need to do that because the songwriting speaks for itself.
Riya
There’s a happy medium to be found there, not overexplaining the music but also showing the process behind [the music creation]. But I agree. Blonde came out at probably the most influential time in my life. Everyone that I know is just so deeply obsessed with that album.
Cadence
No matter what time and phase of my life that I've been in, Blonde is always relevant for a different reason. I can't wait to be 40 years old, upset in the middle of my day because I heard a song from Blonde.
Does the visual media that you're watching while making something end up influencing your music-making process?
Riya
I'm not a cinephile or anything, I will rewatch the movies I really love and try to internalize them for the sake of my music. One pipe dream of mine—like, the moment I’ll know I made it— is when Sofia Coppola asks me to write a score for one of her movies. I love everything that she's done, because I feel like she's the only artist I've seen who's been able to capture what it's like to be a young woman. Not under sexualized, not over sexualized, just accurate, you know, but also still dreamy in an escapist way.
Éric Rohmer has been a consistent inspiration. I love France, but he does a lot of seasonal-based stuff, too. I love his movies A Tale of Autumn, A Summer’s Tale. I've been in the studio before and I've put an Éric Rohmer movie on mute, just to have it in the background as we record. That's the energy that we're going for, that kind of memory/vignette of a certain season.
I love Paris, Texas, obviously. I grew up in Texas, so Southern imagery really resonates with me.
I probably read a book or two a week. I'm really into poetry and essays and nonfiction; I like autofiction, too.
From @quietlight_forever on Instagram
Cadence
It's really cool to take inspiration from other artistic mediums when you're making music. It makes me think again of your use of voice memos and organic sound—they’re not explicitly musical by itself, but can so quickly become a part of the fabric of the music.
You were talking a bit about the idea of a memory, a vignette of a season. I wanted to ask if Going Nowhere has any kind of seasonal association for you.
Riya
It is 100% a fall album. A late fall album…almost winter. I moved from Austin to Boston a few years ago, and the first winter that I had here really killed me. I had grown up and gone to college in basically perfect weather, so it was shocking to me. This album is about a lot of different things, but it's really about emotional and physical coldness; the feeling of summer ending and gearing up for winter. The changing of the seasons means changing of relationships and jobs and all this other stuff, too.
Cadence
Do you ever find that you associate colors with specific sounds or songs?
Riya
The only colors that I ever really see in my music are shades of blue; ocean blue. Sometimes red, if it’s a really lovey-dovey song. Actually, green too; some of my songs feel like they're made for walking through the woods.
Cadence
I don’t think there necessarily needs to be a mysticism in how the colors get associated with the songs. When I'm producing, I have this specific weird thing, and I've not yet found a group of people that resonates with this; but when I'm trying to build a synth or tweak a sound or something, I know that it's ready because it's the right color in my head. And I don't know what that color is going to be until I get it; but then I’ll be like, yeah, that shit sounds teal. It's ready now.
Riya
That's awesome. That's a really great way to go about it, because otherwise you can really tweak any sound or recording till the end of the world.
Photo by Leah Blom
Cadence
I was reading your feature with The Fader and found this quote that really resonated with me. You said, “I thought I wasn't going to make it as a musician, and I was worried that the stress of trying to make it as a musician would make me hate the music.”
There are a lot of artists out there who have wanted to gain some kind of recognition with their music without having to make it their entire livelihood. I think it's absolutely possible to do that, but it's not a prospect you see when you're trying to come into your own artistry. You're either, like, “nobody's listening to my [music]”, or “I'm getting stuck making Tiktoks for my label forever”. So I've been really inspired by artists that can find a middle ground between those two extremes. I've seen you manage to make a name for your music without having to compromise your basic artistic integrity, and I really respect that and I think it's super cool.
I'm interested to know if there were any specific decisions you've made [with your music] that have been conducive to staying true to your artistic vision.
Riya
That's a great question. When I was in high school, I thought it’d be sick to be a rock star, you know, a very old time, Bjork type character. Maybe it was COVID and everything shutting down because of the pandemic, but I sort of realized that all of that was fake.
I started to believe in this idea that you make your own rules in this life. People will tell you constantly that, “Oh, this is the way to do it. You drop out of school, you sign this record label, you go on tour, you do all these things. You drop this album that you've been working on for three or four years, then you go back to the studio and make another album.”
I realized quickly that [method] wasn't going to work for me, in the way I wanted to engage with music. Also, I wasn't interested in being a public figure, or playing the game, or being big on social media. Back in the 90s, people had so much more privacy and the ability to do more with their music because labels actually had money back then; the music industry wasn't penny pinching because Spotify wasn't around, and people bought records and stuff. I kind of still see streaming as the enemy, but the Internet is a tool now, too. So many people make music now because you can just be a musician in your room and put out your music online. Who knows what Fiona Apple and Kate Bush would have been if they had access to SoundCloud, and could make a record in their room and put it online in five minutes?
I've just been doing what feels natural to me. Maybe Quiet Light would be more successful if I listened to other people, but I don't listen to what any of these music industry people tell me to do. I've had a handful of managers and have met with many labels, but no one's really felt right. Maybe I just want to make music and play shows with my friends. It’s kind of silly because Quiet Light is definitely bigger [now] than the way that I'm running it. But I do believe that if you're true to yourself, opportunities will naturally present themselves.
You don't [have to] sell your soul if you just keep working hard and make good music. That's a work ethic that's been taught to me from years of STEM; this belief of working at a problem for long enough, and you'll solve it and it'll pay off. Some pop stars don't want to make that much music. You can have whatever you want to [with your music career]; there's no right or wrong way to do it. It's just dependent on your goals.
Cadence
That's really interesting. I agree that you get to make the rules for your own music. I was going to say your music career, but I don't know if career is the right word because it immediately implies money.
Riya
Music is art, and art is always going to be so much bigger than money. You can put a price on it, but it's never going to be accurate. People have been making art way before the invention of money. I don't know. I don't want to get on my soapbox.
Cadence
You can get on your soapbox. I'm a sociologist.
Riya
We live in such a capitalistic society, and music is the world to me. I’ve been doing music essentially since I was four. So if I reach a point in my career where I've made music my ‘job’, and it's not for me anymore, then I think I'll have an insane identity crisis. If I don't have music, I don't know who I am.
Cadence
I like what you said about the idea of the right opportunities arising when you're already doing what you want to be doing. It seems like you've gotten through the harder part of it now; getting the ball rolling [with your music] is the time that's going to raise the most questions. It's like, “how the fuck do I get anybody to listen to this in the first place?” With a lot of the artists I talk to, everybody has a completely different idea of what they want their music livelihood to be, and how much success they want.
But they do all share this idea of, “well, I'm going to keep making music no matter what, even if no one listens to it”. But if you’re putting it out in the world, it is because [you] would like somebody to listen to it at some point. It’s not even an egotistical thing, or a desire for fame. You just want someone to recognize you for this thing that means so much to you. Even with a lot of my artist friends, the biggest challenge is always, “okay, is anybody going to listen to this shit at the very beginning?”
Riya
Everybody starts out at that point. People forget this, but nobody listened to my music for four years. The fifth year of doing it, people started listening. And so I really affirm my belief in just keeping doing what you're doing.
Cadence
Especially if you started making music without any idea of an audience. In a case like yours where you’ve been making music since you were four years old, you are going to do it regardless of whether someone else is going to listen to it. So why not keep putting it out there? And then it hits when it hits.
It’s like that Maggie Rogers quote where she’s like, “I've always been a firm believer that if you're making good stuff for a long enough time in a place, someone will notice at some point.” It's inevitable.
Riya
Oh, she's so sick for that quote. That's very true.
Photo by Leah Blom
Riya
You said you do college radio; I also did radio in college. I used to interview artists on the show and I'd always be thinking, while I was talking to them, “Wow, these are just normal people. They make amazing art, but if you met them on the street, especially with these indie artists, you would just think that they were just normal people in your hometown. When my stuff started to catch some traction, those same artists were reaching out to me to play shows.
I firmly believe that music is constantly changing and new people are constantly getting recognition, which is different from movies and visual art. A lot of artists have one or two really big albums, then they just make whatever they want to. I'm also a firm believer in that if you made an album that you're proud of, you should just put it out there. You don't even have to think about how to market it or what the visual is going to be.
Cadence
It’s interesting to look at [your own music] through two different lenses. The lens of social media and streaming distorts your idea of what amount of traction constitutes ‘making it’; versus what it would be in real life. If 60 people really fucked with your music, and then you were sitting in front of 60 people who really fuck with your music, that's crazy. But through the social media lens, you’d be like, “damn, only 60 people listen to my music.”
That's why live performance is so special too, because you cannot get around connecting with those people. You are looking people in the eyes who are listening to your music, and it can't just get lost behind social media metrics.
I think it was in your feature with The Fader where you talked about live performance expanding your view on putting out music. I resonated with that a lot.
Riya
I love playing live. I think it's important to continuously change the set and innovate. Sometimes I play shows solo, and sometimes I play with the full band. So much of the world we live in is disconnected, and it's cool to just see people in a space listening to music together. I love going to shows too. It's a religious experience, essentially.
Cadence
Are there any sounds or any genres you haven't made a whole lot of music in yet that you would be interested in experimenting with in the future?
Riya
I'd really like to make a country album. But not an indie country album—a flat out, fully country project. I love country music. Country’s crazy, because there’ll be a really fun lyric followed by the most devastating lyric you’ve ever heard. Then it’s back to “I’m drinking beer with my dad”. I'm working on a witch house record right now, too. It’s taking up a lot of my brain space. I'm always just trying to do something that's a little bit different from what I did before. I like tweaking things a little bit with each project, for sure.
Cadence
I like that the two right now are country and witch house. I think that shows a lot of versatility. It reminds me of Andre 3000 dropping his flute album. I was watching the album video he put out and at the beginning he's like, “Um, yeah, guys, so this is the flute album. I know it's kind of weird, but we're just gonna listen to it now.” And it's awesome. My version of that is the ambient album I’m always threatening to make.
Riya
Doing lyrics and ambient music within the same project—even different projects by the same artist—is a great exercise. Sometimes you just don't have words for what you're trying to say in a song.
It’s great to leave [lyrics] out sometimes. That was something that took me a while to learn because I thought only really technical 40 year old white guys made ambient music. But anybody can do it. I think the people that do it well are just the ones that are willing to get real introspective with it.
Cadence
[Making ambient music] almost feels like the process of tuning everything else out so that you can channel it. In order to make good ambient music, you don't need to [employ] technical skill, because it's not necessarily an exercise in your electronic production ability. It's just asking yourself, “what sound needs to happen here?” Even with normal production, it’s the same process. If you tune in enough, you can almost hear what the song needs next.
Riya
That's so well said. Definitely. Just kind of getting meditative with it, not overworking your production abilities and just being like, let me listen, what does this need?
Cadence
Okay. I've got one more question for you. Looking back in your life, a year ago today, November 6th, 2023, what do you think has changed the most up to this moment?
Riya
I think that I believe in myself significantly more. [I’ve developed] this trust in myself as an artist over the past year, for sure. But also I think that, especially for women artists, it's fairly natural that you feel a lot more capable [as time goes on].
Quiet Light’s album ‘Going Nowhere’ is available on all streaming platforms now.
Photo by Leah Blom
