PipemanRadio Interviews Sahaj of Ra at Louder Than Life 2025

0:04 Hey, you lunto censure. W F see Wow crazy young. This is the pipe Man here on the Avengerance Pipe Man W four Cy Radio. And I'm here with Sahaj from the band Raw Nice. Here at Louder than Life. How's it been so far? Here? We played at twelve forty and I was pretty sure there was gonna be like six or seven rows of people max and it was about I don't know, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred people. It was pretty amazing. That's what's so cool at the DWP festivals, right, Like you don't expect anything at that time of the day, and it's like these people get up and they're loyal early and they're just out there to hear great music like yours.

0:52 Yeah, you're paying full price, you might as well get the whole get the whole package. That's well. Get people that like come to a festival and they only want to see one band, just got to our concert. Yeah, I think this is the place to find music, you know. But the way this is run, it has run so well, and it's really fun and everybody's got a good attitude. Like as long as you're in a good place, everyone around you's in a good place. It was a thousand degrees, right, it was eight billion degrees And I don't think I've had that much fun in five years. So yeah, it's great to hear when it's that hot, because it must suck sometimes when it's that hot. Out. I was in a shade, luckily, like I had just like an hour before. I wasn't in the shade, but that I was in a shade, but the audience was just baking, right, you know. I was just looking at people's scary red tan lines.

1:34 I know it's gonna be scary come Monday. Yeah for them, yeah, not for us. So what else do you have going on after Louder than Life? My day job is actually producing and writing for other bands. Nice. So I work a lot with a band called star Set, Oh, I love them, Yeah. And I work a lot with another band called Nothing More and I love them too. Yeah. And then there's also my buddy Jason Hook used to be in a five finger Death fun She's got his band Flat L And I'm working with aj who used to being Fire from the Gods on his project, which is coming together. It's coming out great. Yeah, I have my plate full, but it's all good. Stuff. How do you find time to make music? All I do is make music, so there's plenty of time for that. I can't make music for myself very fun. Yeah, there's not a lot of There's not a lot of raw time, which is why I put out a single every other month something like that.

2:20 How does it feel to be on like both sides of the fem. I think it's important, Honestly. I don't think I'd be as good a producer and writer if I wasn't also a producer and a performer and a singer. Yeah. I think getting on stage and looking people in the eyes and seeing what makes them excited and moves them viscerally is something you can't do if you just sit in a room in a dark, dark room of the screen. I know a lot of producers that just don't know anything about performing, and you have to write stuff that is fun to perform and makes people excited, I mean nothing more. Maybe arguably, at least to me, the best live band running around, and it's really important that the songs support that. Yeah, totally. And I love your perspective on because it's like I always talk about too, how like record labels, the people that are the suits telling the creatives how to write music. I think it's like the same thing, like, unless you're walking in their shoes, how can you give the proper advice or help them the most?

3:16 The true answer is that there are great A and our guys, and they are a terrible A in our guys. Yeah, And just like they are great bands and they're terrible bands. I think the magic of someone's ability to hear a song. Sometimes people are just so good at hearing a song and they may not be able to write a song, they may not be able to sing, but they can hear a song. And if they have that skill set, then they're gonna be Clive Davis and they're gonna be Ron Perry. They're gonna be those guys. So what happened first for you in your life producing or creating? I always wanted to be an artist, so it started out as an artist thing, and then I had my band, first version of my band, and then ROZs you know Ben ross Sin's nineteen ninety eight, really right, So it's never really deviated from that in terms of personal goals.

3:58 And Ro's a labor of love, a hobby to a certain extent, even though I love putting out stuff, and our fans are really really committed. But I don't tour a lot. I've did one tour in January and another tour in January last year. I and a few weeks here and there. I can get out probably touring less now unless I can find really good support slots that kind of thing. But more importantly, it's just being honest with what it is that makes me excited about music. And sometimes writing my own stuff actually opens doors for stuff that I would write for other people. So see that's pretty cool too, because it's like helpful on both ends for you, right. Yeah, I mean writing music is very much like singing, Like if you stop doing it for years or you don't do it enough, the muscle gets weak.

4:38 Yeah. When I first started the band, I was doing what, fifteen twenty five songs a year. Now I'm doing fifteen twenty five, not twenty five, but ten to fifteen songs a month, which is a very different level of output. Yeah, but not all of them get finished, not all of them get cut. But the idea is that you have to get into the frame of mind that to be competitive, you have to be really really reaching far and trying and trying to say things that people haven't said, and in twenty twenty six, twenty twenty five, how do you say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times? Right? I remember one day I was talking to a band and just came out of my mouth. But I was like, Paul McCartney and John Lennon already wrote all the best melodies. We're just trying to fill in the gaps right now. What a great like concept right there. Yeah, did you see that interview? It was a documentary interview, not to get back one, but the one with I think it was with Rick Rubin where they were listening to Beatles songs and then talking about it. Yeah, and Paul. The greatest part of that whole thing was when Paul McCartney said said something He was like, back then, I was just playing with my bloke John, and now I'm like, oh my god, I was playing with John Lennon. He was like fanboying out on John led. I thought that was the coolest shit.

5:48 I think that's I think that's sort of the magic of honest songwriting because a lot of people, especially now, because technology is so cheap and it's so easy to sort of like go on splice or use an ai or do something and just have something that sounds half way decent with very little effort. Whereas like, it was honest back in the old day, and I don't mean it in a better necessarily right, it was honest in a sense that like there was only your only way of communicating to an audience would be through a visceral experience that they had to react in a way that felt immediate and touchable and accessible and artistically real. And that's why music was special back in the day. Now, because music is a little bit more disposable doesn't mean it's not good, doesn't mean it's not amazing, and doesn't mean that it's not hard to do really well. But even artists like The Weekend and Post Malone, these songs have a shorter shelf life, right, And when I grew up, I listened to Andjustice for All for a year. Nothing else stings dreams of the Blue Turtles for a year now.

6:56 When something I really loved, when Slee Tokens Take Me Back to Eat, an album which I absolutely adore, came out, I listened to it for a few months. Love it. It's awesome, but like once, modern music is so sort of like it's designed to infiltrate your brain as fast as possible because you have a limited amount of attention. Yeah, so it's a little less there's a little less depth that ends up, you know, the perfection of making modern music takes away the mystery a little bit. But sleep Token is still spectacularly mysterious and awesome to me. And so do you look at bands like a Sleeptoken or anybody else since you're a producer in different respect than if you weren't a producer.

7:36 Well, I don't know if I'm capable of making that saying that because I'm home just I'm a producer. But the how long were you? But like what do you remember a time before you were? Yeah, when I was a kid, my brother came home and was playing a lot of fusion jazz and that was like mind warping for me. I was only like six, and I would listen to it and like fantasize like dragons and monsters. And there was a band called Romantic Warrior and I used to love I mean, the band was called a Return at Forever. The record was a Romantic Warrior and I just using the artwork on the record. I used to fantasize what the songs were about, and they were all instrumental. That's a whole other level of sort of like infiltration right where you've now been trans you know. To me, that's what Pink Floyd did so well, is they created an alternate universe that you lived in.

8:22 The Police. Was that for me too? The Police? Besides it being my favorite music, it also was like my first thing that put me in the desert a lot, which I think somehow attracted me to when rob was doing its thing, Like the desertiness of it was very sort of like part of my my brain already. Well, that's pretty cool. And I saw The Police nineteen eighty three goes to a machine tour with Oingo Boingo. But get this, Oino Boingo played in my high school gymnasium and now it's Danny Helth thing. Yeah, of course, like you know, it's like lab He's on the same level as John Williams, right. You know, right, So have feelings like sometimes your vibe is more producer vibe and more and sometimes more of an artist, do you like?

9:08 I mean a lot of a lot of the songs I put out with Ron now may have started with other bands star Set. The DNA that makes star Set and perhaps why he actually likes working with me is because he was a fan of Raw growing up anyway, so there's a DNA. There's not a lot of cross pollinization there, but it is like this sort of like highbrow concept and the singing is, you know, is a lot of singing, not so much screaming that there are things that in certain times of so it crosses between what Ra was doing. And I really enjoy working on that because it feels very personal, like I'm able to dive in on those songs, and then when he takes it and does his own thing to it, sometimes I love it and sometimes I'm like, I think it could have been cooler, But it's his band and he's massively successful, right, So I just look at it from the perspective of working on projects that remind me of things that I care about. Is really satisfying. And that's nothing more by the way, it's anymore as well. I mean, and Johnny, it's Johnny surprises me when he's like he's at the gym and he shows me his phone. You know, you'll take a picture of his phone and show me that he's listening to a raw song at the gym. I'm like, all right, cool, you.

10:16 Know that's cool, right, you know? And so do you think like when you're at a festival like this Learn Life, Yeah, and you're a producer, when you're doing sound check or you're having sound on stage, do you kind of evaluate how those people are doing compared to how you would do it? You mean, like sonically, yeah, not so much live live. I know that there's just there's sort of like there's sort of natural limitations. I'll tell you a band that every time I see them, every time I see them, they sound like just monstrously good. And that's wage War. Every time I see wage War perform, and I know Cody the guitar singer, Oh my god, every time they perform, I'm always like, I don't know how they do that, Like I feel like they're it sounds so good.

11:01 That's great. Yeah, I love it. See. I love when also artists or fans of other bands all yeah, and not saying that any of them aren't. They all are. But I like when they bring it up like you are, so that listeners can see that you're a fan. First artist. Second, Yeah, what did Bono say in that one song? One? He is like every poet is a thief. So you know, the trick is we're all really fans of all this other stuff that motivates us, and sometimes it's you know, like with sleep Token, I'll be honest. When I heard I think it was the offering. When I heard the Offering, I was like, Oh, there's so much that I would love that I've that I've done in some shape or form, but done better. And I was like, Oh, that's really cool that they've taken that to that level and made it that thing. And then again when Take Me Back to Eden came back, my favorite song on that is Granite, And there's just such an incredible sort of like understanding of higher level music but also simplifying it enough to make everybody feel it really really smart, very smart. It's easy to see that tarder when it's more cookie cutter.

12:00 It's harder when there's like twelve bands, and if you took all the singers from the twelve bands and to change them, nothing would happen, right, And that happens a lot too. Well, That's why I say a lot too Nowadays. I feel like a lot of metal bands use this like algebraic equation to make their music. Yeah, the metal pop thing. Yeah, exactly. Well, I gotta tell you, I love your attitude towards everything because you're a true artist in every respective word I can. I can tell that you have so much passion for every side of the music. Weirdly, having done this for this long, right, I still somehow care a lot. Yeah, you still sound like you're it's back in the nineties and you're just starting out like with a dream.

12:40 I hear you're living the Honestly, it surprises me. And also when I wake up and I write a track and I'm like really excited about a part, and I'm always like, where's how many songs? I got like seven hundred songs in my catalog, And I'm like, how am I still coming up with stuff I care about? I always want there about that. By the way, there's there's a natural fear. Every producer that's really successful that I've ever met, they always the same thing where I was like, yeah, dude, I could start sucking tomorrow. So you just never know. And I'm always like in awe of artists being able to create new music after doing it for twenty thirty forty years, Like, how do you keep coming up with new material? I guess the world gives us a lot of material too, Yeah, unfortunately. But especially now.

13:21 Yeah, but that's why I also believe artists should express themselves. Yeah, all the new songs I've been writing real AI themed and different areas and different perspectives and stuff. And I'm a huge podcast guy, so I like to dive really deep on technology and really deep on science, and it's really sort of a mesmerizing And I've been using AI for various things, text to speech, I mean, text to video, and you know, there's AI music generators and some of that stuff is spectacularly good, spectacularly good. Some of it I was using eight months ago and it was like, Eh, this is not helpful at all. And now all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my god, I think this right now, the computer AI guy that's in there is better than half of the co I do. Right right.

14:01 Yeah. Yeah, it's like with podcasting too. You know, it's like you could do a whole podcast without a human Yeah, which. Is yeah, sane, that's only going to get crazier. Right, Well, it's great to have you here at Louder than Life and thanks for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man. Yeah, I love it. Thanks so much man, I appreciate pleasure. Hey, it's so Hi. It's from the band Rye and you're listening to the pipe Man. I'm W four c HY Radio. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipe Man on W for CUI Radio.