Kalidas is a contemporary recording artist with six new songs recently released on his EP called Don’t Vote 4 Trump and other love songs. The Daily Wildcat talked with Kalidas about his EP released on Nov. 15, and he provided a glimpse behind his music as well as the music industry as a whole.
Daily Wildcat: How did you begin to make music and how were you initially inspired to make your own music?
Kalidas: I was just playing, actually, more from a spiritual practice, so I started to play and was just a part of that for some years, and then eventually I started to kind of transition from doing that to actually recording music and eventually more mainstream-ish music.
DW: How does your EP tie into modern politics?
K: There’s one political song, the feature, and that one was obviously about Trump. But it’s also more so, I think, about how money has dominated our political system in terms of campaign financing and things like that for decades basically.
There’s a lot of big money in these buyout elections. So, you know, I think there are certain aspects of politics in our society where a lot of the people that are in Congress don’t necessarily relate to the people who are working class people.
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DW: What was your experience with recording and being in the music industry?
K: The first time I recorded was kind of interesting. When I was in Santa Monica, a guy just ripped me off of like $1,000 … He just got pissed one day and he ended up throwing a chair and I went to court to get my money back, and the judge filed against me.
It was the most absurd thing because, I mean, we laid out the facts. I had paid him $1,000 and he had given me nothing in exchange. It’s kind of funny, though, because I ended up working with a really good producer in Los Angeles … It worked out because he kind of gave me a good deal on my first recording.
DW: Are you excited to release your music? Are you feeling any nervousness?
K: Yeah, I am … I’ve been recording music for over a decade now and I kind of understand the industry a lot better. I know it’s not like one of those quick fix kind of things. It’s not just like instantaneous or anything. And I know there’s a lot of money behind the industry as well …
I think the guy who’s my promoter for this, for college radio, he was telling me that a lot of these companies, like these bigger companies, will do a test run for a song, right? And even a test run is like $40,000 … They’re just testing it. Then after the testing, you know, they actually do the full-on marketing, which is like a $100,000 plus.
Obviously I can’t compete with those kinds of dollars, and, you know, a lot of indie artists can’t. But there are occasional indie artists who are just very passionate and very good who break through.
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