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Rolling Stone: Jazzing It Up
June 2008
Rolling Stone
The voice that had producer John H Hammond - he scouted Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen - champion it, is on the revival route. Asha Puthli in her upcoming album Lost, shows us that she can still play the game even after over two decades. Her last album Only the Headaches Remain released in 1982, and now she awaits the release of her ninth solo album in September, though only in Europe under the Kyrone label.
 She carries on to elaborate upon the multifarious genres - blues, pop, electro, world that she has indulged in. But she catches us off guard when she defines the sound of her new album in rock. Though she shies from giving away her age with evasive liners such as “I am spiritually 6,000, mentally 98, emotionally 5 years old and chronologically in between, Puthli pretty much mothers today's generation of musicians. So at this stage in her life, and having trusted her sound to subscribe mostly to an eclectic mould of jazz and classical rock leaves us a tad bit tizzy in the head and in heavy anticipation of what the album would sound like. The album captures a Café Del Mar feeling, adds Puthli.
As the conversation broods upon the future, we shift Puthli into reverse gear, back to the halcyon days of drugs, sex and rock & roll - the Seventies - to reveal an interesting piece of trivia. Andy Warhol was a buddy of Puthli's back in the day. He would observe everything while other people around him were spilling their dramas, their traumas, their ideas, their dreams, and their secrets which he absorbed in quiet delight. That was his big talent, she says. Puthli had an album (You Can) Take It Out on Me due for release in the Seventies, but which got shelved later. Puthli recalls discussing the cover art (a shot of a man's crotch wearing tight blue jeans) for that album with Warhol at the legendary Max's Kansas City club in New York. The next Puthli knows is that the Rolling Stones use a similar concept for the cover of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. And the designer for it? Andy Warhol. Puthli believes Warhol was trying to say something with the album name too.
Sticky fingers is an old idiom for kleptomania I believe, laughs Puthli. But she carries on to clarify that this is no accusation, I've always believed in a collective consciousness, which we are all part of and I do give Andy the benefit of the doubt, that he too may have come up with a similar concept coincidentally, but not wanted to share it with me seeing how similar our concepts were. The concepts are the same but the visuals were different.
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