In Conversation with Weston Estate

By: Avani Saraswatula and Ojesvii Sethi

Weston Estate, self branded as “ya aunty’s favorite boy band,” is a North Carolina-based band made up of Marco Gomez, Tanmay Joshi, Abhi Manhass, Srikar Nanduri, and Manas Panchavati. Their unique sound and lyrics have gained them many fans since 2017, when they first started their band. Now, they’re signed with Arista Records, and have released their first music video “Saturday Nights”. Despite their exponential success, the band has stuck close to their roots, continuing to do the majority of production in-house, making sure to perfect every song. Monsoon sat down with Srikar Nanduri, a guitarist and songwriter for the band to find out more:

What first got you into music?

Oh, that’s a good question. No one has ever asked me that actually.  I guess just listening to a lot of music made me excited to want to make it. Ever since I was in late elementary school, early middle school, I started listening to 2000s rap like Kanye, Jay-Z, and all those guys.  Later on in high school, when I met the other guys in the band, I started listening to a lot of indie rock and indie pop, and stuff like that. From there, we just kind of realized that maybe we should just try to make a song one day. Hearing music that we liked would make us excited to make music. Listening to a lot of music together, with those guys, got me into making music.

How did you guys come up with your name?

Basically, Tanmay lives across from this neighborhood called Weston Estates. We just thought it sounded cool. Tanmay and Abhi were playing PlayStation together or something. It was right after we made our first song, but we didn’t know if this was gonna be a band, or what this was going to be, or what we were going to call it or anything like that. Once we started talking about it, Tanmay was like, “Oh, I don’t know why, but I really like the word ‘estates.’” And then Abhi was like, “Do you mean like Weston Estates?” Then, he [Tanmay] was like, “Yeah, like that.” And he [Abhi] was like, “Why don’t we just use that name?” That’s literally how it happened.

What is your creative process?

Abhi, who is our producer, had just got FL Studio, which is the production software. He started off just messing around with beats and stuff for fun and all of us would give him feedback. He would base it off of a lot of the music that all of us would collectively listen to. If he heard a song he liked, if it was an A$AP Rocky, or a Kanye, or I don’t know, a Glass Animals song.  He’d take inspiration from that and try to make a beat similar to that and we would give him feedback. 

So it really depends on a case by case basis. What usually happens is that me and Abhi, who is the producer, will get together by ourselves and try and make a beat. He’ll make a beat and I’ll come up with a guitar loop, and then he’ll put the beat over that. Then, we’ll structure it and make it so this part is where the verse is, this part is where the chorus is, and stuff like that. After we finish the beat, we’ll send it to the vocalists, that’s Manas, Tanmay and Marco, and then they’ll record themselves humming over it trying to come up with melodies.  They’ll do a brief four minute recording coming up with melodies off the tops of their heads with no words or anything, just humming. From there, we all get together and pick out all the melodies out of all of the audio files we like and then pick the best ones that fit with the best chorus or best verse. From there, we’ll structure the melodies and start writing the lyrics.  That’s usually what it is.

Writing is definitely the hardest part just because sometimes we don’t know. Because there’s five of us, it’s kind of hard to choose one direction to take for the song because all of us have different ideas. It takes a while. Basically, what we have to do is sit down and come up with a general theme, a general mood, or a general story of where we want to take the song.  

I’ll give you an example: “Cotton Candy”.  We were literally in a slump, we had no idea what we wanted to write the song about. We knew we wanted to write it about a girl and generic love-type stuff. But, we had no idea how we wanted to convey that, what metaphors we wanted to use, or how the song made us feel. I was literally scrolling through my notes while these guys were trying to come up with lyrics. And I saw this grocery list and I started reading through the grocery list, and they were like, “We can probably use some of these words, right?” I think I had candy on the list and Tanmay just heard that word, and instantly the chorus came to his head and he started singing it. That was where the idea for this song came from. And the rest was based on this idea of how many different things can we talk about, when we talk about a girl who makes you feel like your life is like Candy Land, basically.  

It depends on how we’re feeling writing the song and it depends on the different ideas we can come up with. A lot of times we’ll be sitting on a basically-done song with all of the melodies and the beat done, but writing the lyrics for it ends up taking two, three months extra.  We want to make it sound like it comes from a genuine place but not overly corny.  It takes a long time, but usually it’s just a spark, like something just happens and then everything just connects instantly, and you figure out the direction you want to take this song.  

How has your creative process been affected by COVID-19?

Me and Abhi go to N.C. State, Manas and Tanmay go to UNC, Marco went to Duke, but he doesn’t go to Duke anymore. Before COVID, all of us were in different places and it was kind of hard for us to hang out.  For the first couple of months, we were stuck at home, but it wasn’t something we weren’t used to since we were kind of dispersed anyway.  Now, we’re honestly actually meeting more than we used to than when we were in school.  In a way, the fatigue of being at home and doing school from home hindered our creative process for a bit. But I think now, things are getting back to better than they were before.

Do you sing in the shower? What songs?

That is a good question. I sing in the shower very often.  “Summertime in Paris” by Jaden Smith, that’s been a big one. I just need to look through my Spotify playlists. There's this guy called Omar Apollo, who has this song called “Kamikaze,” that’s another song I’ve been really vibing with. And then like, Harry Styles. It’s a wide range of things but, yes I do.

Is there an artist or group that you guys are inspired by?

The good thing about there being 5 of us is that we all draw our inspirations from different people. Obviously, there’s a lot of commonalities since we all listen to similar types of music.  We all have different specific songs and different specific sounds that we all really like, and when we combine them, it creates something that is inspired by a lot of different things. But at the same time because it has so many different aspects combined with it, it ends up sounding like its own unique thing. Frank Ocean is probably a big inspiration for us. Bakar, No Vacation, Omar Apollo is another big one, Benee, Jaden Smith, Dominic Fike- those are some of the big ones.  We’re always trying to discover new music; if we find a song we like instantly, we’re like, “Ok, let's try and see where we can take inspiration from this.” There's like a couple hundred artists that we listen to daily that we take inspiration from.

What’s next for you guys?

Just making more music, finishing songs.  We want to put out maybe 3 or 4 more singles before we talk about an album because we don’t know exactly what direction we want to go with if we make an album. I know I want our first album to be insane.  I know I want it to have a crazy concept behind it and something that’s very cohesive.  I just don’t want to put a bunch of different songs on an album and call it an album. I want it to have a story and have cohesion to it.  That conversation is probably pretty far down the road.  For now, it’s just keep making music that we like, keep making singles, releasing singles, and hopefully people will like them.

Weston Estate just released a video for their song “Saturday Nights”, streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Soundcloud, Deezer, and Amazon Music.