Ameet

As a young Jesuit school choirboy in Mumbai, Ameet Kamath found that beyond the guilty pleasures of Bollywood production numbers lay the even guiltier pleasures of Western top-of-the-pops rock that found its way east—The Beatles, ABBA, and Queen—and that eventually brought him west.

“My parents thought I’d grow out of it. But I didn’t. That was the scene I fell in love with—the singers and bands who showed off their stuff to audiences who understood the fun and joy of the music. I still haven’t grown out of it.”

What he grew into, while living in New York, and San Francisco, was a way to give voice to his experience of the modern, young, Indian diaspora—not the stereotype of the immigrant Indian cab driver or doctor—in the musical language he’d come to love.

“I wanted to be an Indian vocalist who told his stories through Western pop. How hard is that to imagine? Pretty hard, I guess, from the reactions I used to get when listeners didn’t hear any bloody tabla or sitar. Look, I didn’t want to be another Indian crossover singer. If my music crosses over anything, it’s from pop to folk-rock.”

Those, to him, were the global languages, the barrier-breaking languages.

How well he succeeded is evident from the very first cut of his debut album, “Greasy Rails.” The finely-crafted lyrics reveal a gifted storyteller who sets his driving pop-rock rhythms (sans sitar and tabla) to fearlessly personal tales of the Indian diaspora. “Greasy-Rails” is pleasure-pumped global rock that defies and surpasses cliché. Uncompromised pop, New York bred and Mumbai bound.