Meet Abhi Ananda

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Abhi Ananda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Abhi below.

Hi Abhi, thank you so much for opening up with us about some important, but sometimes personal topics. One that really matters to us is overcoming Imposter Syndrome because we’ve seen how so many people are held back in life because of this and so we’d really appreciate hearing about how you overcame Imposter Syndrome.
This is an interesting question. I’m not sure if I had this same situation. But, if any readers feel like they’re in this situation, hopefully they can relate to my story.

I’m a musician and I used to have this mindset that I wanna do my music career in a band and do everything with it. Even though I can and I had performed solo before, I have never thought about doing my music primarily as a solo. I don’t know why, but I feel like if I wanna have a solo career, I’ll do it after I have an established band project. That’s what I thought back then.

The time during and after the pandemic (for me it was 2020-2022) totally changed this. My band project fell apart and I didn’t do any live gigs at all. I still played guitar and wrote songs, but I didn’t know for what. I just knew that I’m gonna record this song when I have a new band someday. And, I kept hoping that it’s happening soon. In the end, this situation really took a toll on me. I was kinda depressed and I was looking for ways to reinvent myself again, personally and musically.

In the mid of 2021, I came up with a daring resolution: quitting social medias. Slowly but for sure, I regained my happiness and sanity again. I started to have a better perspective of what I want and what really matters to me and, eventually, I was able to be productive again musically. From my experience, (I’m not saying that you should do what I did), the thing that helped me the most is a situation where you stop comparing yourself to other people and just focusing on doing the best you can. I think when you do something because you genuinely love it, it shows.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and composer. I was born in Indonesia and I’m trying to pursue the American dream by moving to the US in 2016. I started my career in Twin Cities, Minnesota and eventually moved to Los Angeles where I reside until now.

I’m proud to label myself as an original artist. So, if you see me doing a cover, you will hear a totally different version from the original. I finally released my music last year with two albums. My first one is more like a singer-songwriter style. Meanwhile, the second one is an instrumental neoclassical album. This year I officially launched my new project, Almost Citizen. I consider this one as a rebirth of my old band project, HYDN. For the first album that I’m working on right now, I use some old materials from HYDN and also some new ones that I discovered during my hiatus period. I can say that Almost Citizen will be a very exciting project for me musically because I have a platform to blend some genres that I truly enjoy currently: electronic music, ambience, shoegaze, post-rock, and dream pop with my previous music background.

You can listen to my music, both from my solo project (Abhi Ananda) and Almost Citizen, in all major streaming platforms. I also have YouTube and Soundcloud channel for both.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Punctuality. The simplest example is by showing up on time. This eventually will help you to excel in many areas of life. It trains you to be discipline, organized, and goal-oriented.

2. Authenticity. Be true to yourself and speak what you mean out loud. You win people’s attention by ‘pleasing’ them, but you win people’s heart by being genuine.

3. Determined. Be hard on yourself to execute your plan. Don’t procrastinate or settle for less!

I think the best way to practice and develop these three qualities are by meeting more people and making plans with them such as: hangout, dinner, jam session, workout, collaboration, and etc.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Yes definitely! It’s always been a pleasure to make music with other people, and especially, if the collaboration can move forward into a bigger project. First of all, I think I prefer someone whose goals or dreams align with the collaboration. The next (and also the last factor that matters to me) is whether this person is easy to work with or not. By that, I mean if they can really follow the plans and show up in meeting, rehearsal, or gigs. It seems very simple, but trust me, it’s very rare to find someone who can do this CONSISTENTLY.

For readers who are interested to collab with me, the best way to reach me out is by work email. You can access that from Contact section on my website. Ideally, I’d like to meet and know the person first either via Zoom or over a coffee.

Contact Info:

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