Sameer Gadhia of Young the Giant Explains the Immigrant Themes of ‘Home of the Strange’

Matt Matasci

With their third album “Home of the Strange,” Southern California alternative rock quintet Young the Giant took a new approach to songwriting. Instead of observing others, they looked to their own stories as inspiration. The result is an album that pushes their sound lyrically and sonically. Lead singer Sameer Gadhia spoke with Entertainment Voice about the socially aware nature of “Home of the Strange” and taking these songs to the remote locales.

You adjusted your songwriting style for this album, injecting yourself into the narrative as opposed to taking an observational standpoint. What inspired this shift?

I think we established a relationship with our listeners and we were ready to make a change and tell our story a little bit. We are an American band, but where we actually come from and what’s beneath that is more than the two line blurb everyone knows about us. I thought our narrative would be unique and resonate with a lot of people.

You do have a very unique point of view as a band with your background.

Not even just being rock musicians. It is being people who live in America who identify with American culture but are torn in between that story we’re in and the story of where we came from. For me, in that case, it’s being Indian. Even completely removed from the fact that I’m a musician, though, the great thing about that is I do have that platform to say these things. I feel like it resonates with a lot of young sons and daughters of immigrants. Yes, it does make us a bit different as a band, but also very similar to how the make-up of America is and that should be acknowledged more as a narrative.

From a production standpoint, I think “Home of the Strange” is your best-sounding record. What changes were made to the songwriting and recording process to achieve this sound?

In the past we were leaving a lot up to the producer. This particular time it has been full-on collaboration with the producer, Alex Salibian. He’s a young guy and I think he just got our aesthetic and what we want to do. I think it’s been on the tip of our tongue since we started this band, where we wanted to go sonically. But it’s taken two albums for us to figure out what’s been existing there. It’s been ready to roll for a while.

I think it’s just a mix of irreverence and reverence. Spreading everything through tape, using the studios like Sunset Sound and Electro-Vox, these historic studios in Los Angeles. But at the same time using Logic, using GarageBand, using iPhone recorders for certain sounds and just destroying everything on the floor and then piece it back together in the most reverent way we could imagine.

Did you find that there was less pressure working on this album versus your last record, the follow up to your breakthrough debut?

Yeah, most definitely, there’s always that looming idea of a sophomore album. The way we dealt with it on the second record was completely removing ourselves from that. Young the Giant has always been, as a band name, about removing yourself from the talk and the hype and the expectation. It’s about harnessing the youthful idea of knowing what we can do is what we can do and not thinking about anything beyond that.

I think most definitely there was pressure amongst ourselves. The continuous storyline is that we always wanted to challenges ourselves as a band regardless of how we look from the outside and that’s always been our prerogative. So, we found that fluidity, going through the second-record process, going through that ordeal and, also doing the year and a half touring cycle, we learnt a lot as musicians. I think it did help a lot.

Were you inspired by the increased politicization of immigration that has come with the election cycle or are these themes something you wanted to explore before that point?

You know, our immigrant story has always been something that I wanted to talk about. And it just happened to be that in the last year it has become highly politicized and it’s one of the big topics in the American election. I think it was some sort of serendipity or coincidence that thematically this album has more to say beyond the lines of the immigrant story. I think it means a lot to other people who are not immigrants and just believe in general equality and the right for freedom.

We haven’t been shy about political beliefs; this record wasn’t necessarily a political one. But when we toured behind our records in 2013-14, we played colleges and you kind of see the general striation of this story, this narrative in America. There has been an absence there for a long time and now it’s just become so undeniable that people are speaking out about it. There’s just such a polarization of beliefs, and we saw that change dramatically in before it was making headlines. We saw pickets at college campuses, we saw the KKK coming out and giving out flyers.  I remember spending a holiday in Berlin and it’s just like intense political tension that’s happened over there in the last year or so. I think in some ways we have the ability to see things before the headlines are pressed because we get to travel and see what’s happening on the ground.

I am really interested in going to Birmingham, Alabama, the Deep South. I’m interested in bringing this music there and just seeing the faces in the audience. You can kind of see the striation of our fan base. Some of them are more conservative, some of them are kids of color, some of them are young people.  It’s just interesting to have that conversation on stage, even subconsciously. It’s always there in the room and it’s an interesting conversation to have under the guise of a rock show, so that’s cool.

Young the Giant are on tour now and play NYC’s Radio City Music Hall Sept. 17, Austin City Limits Oct. 2 & 9 and LA’s Greek Theatre Oct. 21.