Kannada's metal Jois stick

A small town boy who moved to the city of dreams to pursue his passion – this is the story of 24-year-old musician Hemanth Jois. A bloke from Koppa, Chikamagalur, Hemanth is a guitarist, songwriter and composer, who recently gave a ‘metal’ twist to Kannada classics. Talking about his covers, he says, “I wanted to see how people will react to metal in Kannada. So, I did a cover of the song Keli Premigale and it ended up crossing 50,000 views on Facebook. Soon, people requested me to cover the song Santoshakke. Post this, I got a call from the director who started the YouTube channel Potato Chipz and he asked me to do a Shankarnag tribute. So, I ended up covering Santoshakke and also Keladhe Nimagiga.”

For someone who quit his job and moved to Bengaluru last year, Hemanth initially made a living in the city by taking guitar classes. Soon, he launched ‘The Jois Project’, with the intention of collaborating with other talented artistes. “There are no fixed members in the project. I’ve collaborated with many skilled vocalists – these people are singers in the Kannada film industry (KFI). We also perform at colleges,” he reveals. He got introduced to the KFI when he met vocalist Chetan Naik through his friend Charan Rao. Soon, Hemanth and Chetan collaborated to compose his first song under The Jois Project. “We worked on a song called Tunturu, which was launched in July. The song is about childhood and school days. We shot the track in beautiful Malnad. When we came up with the song, we wanted to see how rock music will sound in Kannada,” says Hemanth. Considering Tunturu garnered more than 30,000 views on YouTube, the team decided to work on a second song, which will be out in the last week of December.

Taking us back to his early days as a musician, Hemanth reveals that he grew up admiring Metallica, Iron Maiden and Linkin Park. “In my town, a lot of people didn’t even know what a guitar was! I bought a guitar and started learning how to play it, thanks to the Internet. It took me a lot of time to realise what kind of music people actually wanted to listen to in Kannada. Usually, nobody here cares about the composer or the guitarist, they only care about the singer,” says Hemanth.

The young songwriter is now composing tunes for films like Aadhyam, Heggar Kote and a few other untitled flicks. Stating that he’s happy to see things change in the Kannada film music scene, he adds, “Earlier, nobody cared about the background score, but now people are noticing it. There are a lot of young musicians bringing about a change. They are actually taking risks.” As for his future plans, this artiste wants his project to be one that churns out great Kannada rock music. “As a hard rock fan, touring with the band is my first preference. Also, I’d like to explore the movie industry and see how rock will work there. Considering my genre is completely different from the industry, I get to learn a lot,” he says.