After posting "a thousand crappy YouTube videos" over the years, Aki Kumar -- aka "The Only Bombay Blues Man" -- has gone for the real thing with "Dilruba," a track from his forthcoming sophomore album Hindi Man Blues.
The clip shows the India-born Kumar and his band performing the song, in Hindi with subtitles, while he fantasizes about a potential relationship with a young woman he spots in the audience. "This is my first full-production music video, and oh man, it was great," says Kumar, who came to the U.S. to study software engineering and worked at Adobe before devoting himself full time to the blues. "It helps me to exercise another part of my creativity and put together a story and visualize it and bring it to life." His friend Nandini Bharadhwaj, who plays the love interest in the clip, also helped Kumar choreograph the video.
"I wanted to show off some retro Bollywood dance moves from the '80s, which I thought were corny back then," says Kumar, who co-directed the video with Jeremiah Hutchens. "I had a great time with it." The ending is left ambivalent in the video -- does he get the girl in the end? "We'll never know," he says with a laugh. "It's totally all in my head."