One of the most consistent voices in Indian independent music, singer-songwriter and guitarist Dhruv Visvanath has always told stories through his songs. But while earlier efforts featured elaborate characters and plot lines, his third album finds him simply looking to his own life for inspiration. Recovering from what he calls his roughest patch ever, Visvanath overcame writer’s block by journalling everything he has felt—in song. Consequently, the impassioned vocals and intense instrumentation that characterise his work sound even more forceful. These compositions comprise his most fully formed release yet. “I was writing songs about my depressive episodes. I was writing songs about my childhood. I was writing a song about my heartbreak. I was writing a song about the fact that I love writing songs,” Visvanath tells Apple Music. “I looked at the whole thing and was like, these are all really personal stories. [It was] as if I was reading my own autobiography.” Here’s the making of The Book of I, track-by-track. Dear Madeline “The song came to me around the time when my mom was getting her gall bladder removed. When you think about a parent going into hospital, you think of yourself as a child. It brought me back to all these people I’d met as a child. Madeline was my neighbour in Bombay when I was three to four years old. It wasn’t until two decades later when we reconnected. The memories brought up this feeling of nostalgia and the realisation that the people you’ve grown up with, grew up as well.” Dark “I wrote it in 2018, which I think was probably the worst year of my life. The one big positive was the success of my second album The Lost Cause. But I just couldn’t enjoy it because at the same time, there were so many traumatic events going on in my personal life that ate at me. I just ended up thinking about all that had happened, and the stress I had taken on. And I was starting to acknowledge that I was in a dark place and that, in some way, I was destroying myself. That’s basically where it came from. I had my friend Ajay Jayanthi play violin on it. His lines feel like the second voice in the song. I find him to be such an empath. His contribution is just magical.” Wildfire (feat. Shubh Saran) “It’s about childlike innocence, and trying to remove yourself from the responsibility of being an adult and just being happy. It’s a collaboration with Shubh Saran. I wanted a song with a fun guitar solo. Shubh and I are old friends. I love the way he plays. There’s this fire-and-ice kind of feeling with the mixes of ‘Dark’ and ‘Wildfire’. ‘Dark’ is a lot brighter, a lot sharper. Then you listen to ‘Wildfire’ and it almost feels like it was made on tape.” Write “This is by far my favourite out of all the songs [on the album]. Because it’s the first song I wrote after two years of writer’s block. This is also the first song I ever recorded in a big studio, at Island City in Mumbai. The inspiration came from the fact that I love writing songs. To me, songs have always been therapy. Whenever I was in pain, whenever I was unhappy, whenever I was in distress or anything of the sort, I had music to save me. This song healed a part of me.” Carry “The idea of the song was that we all go through this journey in life where we assume other people are fine—but we all carry our trauma with us, our pain with us, wherever we go. It was one of those things when you sit in a moment of silence and you take stock of your responsibilities, the things you feel accountable for, and sometimes there’s this big fear that you might not have somebody else with whom to share this baggage. That’s the story I wanted to tell.” Wish It Were You “I have only had one romantic relationship in my life so far. [After] we ended things, there was a pause of trying to figure out who I was as an individual. I felt myself being so attached to this idea of this person that I was with. There was always a sense of uneasiness I would feel when I would travel to a new location or play a gig somewhere, that I would have loved to have done these things with somebody like you. To have my first genuine heartbreak, this was the only way I could process it, to write a song about it.” The Mountain King “I prepared this song for the film Taish. It hearkens to my older days of writing songs when I would create a character and a story. The chords and everything feel like chanting, almost. I wrote the song for the movie, but I had put a lot of effort into it so [I thought] why not just put it out there? I grew up listening to a lot of hard rock and metal and this was the closest I was going to get to that.” Obituary “This is the last song I produced in this series. It’s mostly about saying goodbye to the person you were, and trying to give yourself a chance of being born again. I want to say goodbye to the pain I felt, to all the sadness I’ve been through and start with a clean slate. I found samples and designed a whole orchestra part for it.” The Enigma “It’s a reproduction of the song I released on my first album, Orion. I took this on as a personal challenge, because it was really important for me to revisit something that I had already made and make it better. To show the world how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve built on my abilities and skills, not just as a musician, but as a producer, as a songwriter and what I find imperative in telling a story through song.” The Enigma (feat. Warren Mendonsa & Randy Slaugh) [Instrumental] “In August 2019, I played a Dhruv Visvanath & Friends show at Flea Bazaar Café in Bombay. I had [vocalist] Siddharth Basrur. I had [keyboardist] Rohan [Rajadhyaksha]. I had [guitarist] Warren [Mendonsa]. It was a big night. When Warren came on and played ‘The Enigma’, the crowd went wild. I thought, what if I had an instrumental version where I remove everything I say and put Warren’s guitar on top? He lives in New Zealand now so I sent him a message saying, ‘Can you take out a bit of time?’ He was like, ‘Done.’ He sent me the file, and it blew my mind.”