International Rock Meets American Folk In SelfTitled Album By SOHM

When he was young, the Nepalese-born and Denver-based singer SOHM, was singing and performing American and British rock & roll and heavy metal music in bands Nepal’s tourist areas. 

Now that he’s older and living in the U.S., SOHM has taken those rock and metal experiences, blended them with his true love, American and international folk music and created a varied and nuanced Neo-folk sound in his first major release, a self-titled album called “SOHM.”

“When I grew up, Nepal was essentially the end of the hippie trail from the 1970s,” SOHM said. “A lot of the music I grew up listening to was old American rock & roll, Jimi Hendrix things like that, so I was singing a lot of hard rock. Then I slowly moved into metal music, my first big band I played with at 18 or 19 years old was metal. We played Metallica, Pantera, British heavy metal, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath. In conjunction to that I was listening to Nepali rock and Nepali pop, and of course Nepali folk music, so my interest in folk music really comes from that. When I came to the states I gravitated naturally toward American folk music, things like Appalachia and banjo music, the Delta Blues, and old country music.”

His new album, called “SOHM,” features 12 songs displaying the singer-songwriters love for history and culture combined with his one-of-a-kind musical style that draws from many different influences.

Some of the songs, like “War Will Never End,” pull from SOHM’s childhood in a country in the grip of a civil war that saw 14,000 of its citizens killed in almost a decade.

“My thinking about ‘War Will Never End’ was not necessarily the intellectualization of war, you always find people who are pro war or against war,” he said. “I’m a history guy and you can go back to Alexander and all of the wars, invading places, and somebody always has to do the fighting. Someone’s child always has to do the fighting. This is not necessarily a pacifist position. It’s just an attempt for me to write a song about trying to understand the perspective of the person who’s actually doing the fighting. Whether the war is actually justified, historical realities, social realities, whatever they may be, it always seems there’s always one guy who has to do it.”

SOHM said some of his other songs focus on how people may be different, but there are similarities between all people.

“For example, if you’re a middle-aged man, you can be in Ghana or you can be in Japan, and you're starting to think about your life, what’s going to happen,” SOHM said. “I find generally, in my travels, I see a lot of similar things if not similar perspectives in people, and I think my album is trying to focus on the human connected us of just us. When I’m singing ‘Oh Ma,’ we’ve all got mothers no matter where you’re from. If there was one coherent message in the entire album, it would be my attempt to point out the similarities. We all know about the dissimilarities, no one needs help figuring that out.”

When he first came to America at the age of 18 in about 2008, SOHM worked to create a typical American lifestyle, he went to university, sold commercial real estate and traveled, living in Ohio, Chicago, and Florida before settling, at least for now, in Colorado, a mountainous area similar in geography to his home in Nepal.

Since the pandemic, SOHM decided it was time to pick up his guitar and ukulele and get back into making music, something he had largely put on the back burner for years.

“I just got into the music game very late,” he said. “From 18-31, I essentially did what everybody who wasn’t into music did, went to university, got a job. So, when I’m producing an album, it’s also my shot, and I have to be honest to the music that I love when it goes out into these albums. I’m definitely trying to introduce a perspective. Finally, I’m able to do this, I’ve been able to put this album out and hit the creative side of me, which I really missed. I didn’t know how much I missed until I started writing again, and I don't think I’m going to stop.”

Make sure to stay connected to SOHM on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/sohmmusic  
Instagram: https://instagram.com/sohmmusic?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= 
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdE9QYgt/ 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SohmMusic?t=wDdtHaWKFR_Yz-l0GD7cig&s=08 
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6857bjHDY8NOGxd3nV9csC 
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQo7I5Ymkf6n9MmvBuOtX2g