The Yellow Diary wishes to go on global stage like BTS: Indians think Bollywood is the ultimate for music

Seven years ago, it was the song Marz which brought five boys together to create a band The Yellow Diary (TYD), which eventually composed several hit songs together. Meanwhile Marz continues to be the favourite for the band, as music producer Himonshu Parikh states, “Someone is discovering Marz everyday.” He goes on to add, “TYD didn’t make Marz, it made the TYD. It is that one song that led us all to meet each other. It is our first song and will always be special.”

Rajan Batra, the vocalist chimes in, “Sometimes you create a song that exists and evolves with you.” While Marz continues to be a bigger entity than the band, the thought of it overpowering their present and future work doesn’t bother them. Drummer Sahil Shah reveals, “When we create a song we just put our hearts and soul into it. For us it is not about it becoming a hit.” Batra adds, “We never really make music for what it is going to look like on papers in terms of number.”

After seven years of being together, Batra states the boys have become “more like family”. “Whatever music we create is a byproduct of our friendship. Making music is not the centre of our being, being together is the centre of it,” he mentions. Ask them what goes all during their jamming sessions and Shah lists a few things including “a lot of jokes and pot shots at each other”.

The boy band now wishes to take their music to the global stage. Bassist Stuart Da Costa elaborates, “For us the next big thing is taking ourselves to the global stage. People look at music in India and they think the ultimate is Bollywood. But the world is much bigger. We feel like we need to take our music to the world and then if Bollywood happens it happens.” Batra adds, “BTS is from Korea but they were never isolated to just Koreans outside their country. They even started singing in English, They were accepted for whatever they were creating. I feel we have come to a point where the world has started to accept no matter what language . We want to play to every person who wants to listen to us.”

The boy band recently performed in Mumbai and Pune for the Road to Lollapalooza India.