Pune has a new voice, and it’s one worth stopping everything for. Himanshu Chavan is a country boy with a guitar and a lot to say. His debut EP, Land of the Free, arrives this month and it carries the weight of a life lived through loss. He lost his city. He lost his mother. But somewhere in that unravelling, he found himself, and he found music. The five songs on the EP are the ones that carried him through his darkest years, comfort songs he kept returning to. When we sat down with the record, an hour disappeared before we noticed. This is his story.
Land of the Free
I had started learning the guitar in 2017, and by 2019, I had recorded a few songs that were not my best work. I have always wanted to put my music out because I have always had a bank of at least 50 songs to release. But after 2020, I was not able to release anything. My mom was going through cancer, and it was just her and me, so music, in terms of releasing and performing, got shelved for three years. I just kept ruminating…wondering if I could ever get back to it and if I would ever be able to do that again. Once my mom passed away, I had this intense rush to create. To go out and prove myself. So I ran away to Goa and started going to places where I could just do what I truly love, which is writing songs over and over again. I travelled to Goa, Manali, the mountains and the beaches, anywhere I could go. I just wrote as much as I could without worrying about releasing music. During those travels, the idea came to me that maybe I should put out the five songs that make up the EP, Land of the Free. Over the years, I had written so many songs full of misery and heavy feelings about what I was going through, yet I kept coming back to the hope in all of it. I realized there were these five songs that made me feel hopeful and carried me through as a listener. These songs helped me navigate the last few years and the sense of freedom I eventually felt.
Being Nothing Yet Something
The idea of calling it the Land of the Free is my own way of understanding what freedom means. It first struck me when I left my city and found myself just wandering, realizing I had become a kind of nobody. I felt as if I had lost everything that used to define me, and I had no sense of what I was supposed to do, what I was going to do, or what I was meant to do. Yet in the middle of feeling so lost, it suddenly occurred to me that this might actually be the greatest gift, because if I am not anything right now, then I am free to choose who I want to become. The places I moved through and the experiences I had made me feel that precisely because I was nothing in that moment, I could decide what to put out into the world and what to write about, with nothing left to lose. That wandering, that searching for myself, became my idea of freedom, and the five songs on the EP are there to comfort me whenever I feel I do not belong anywhere.
Songs And Their Meanings
The EP is rooted in the idea of finding hope even when everything seems to be falling apart. Writing these songs taught me that, when you look back on the past, holding on to the good moments matters; it’s more meaningful than trying to forget everything. When the Water Was Sweet is the oldest song on the record; I wrote it when I was 18. To me, it captures the heart of the EP: remembering as an active form of loving someone or something, instead of erasing it. I think it’s worthwhile to remember things, even if they’re no longer around. The song is about my grandmother. Her voice is on the record too.
Evelyn is also a story. In 2021, I was in Bangalore playing a Sofar gig. After my performance, I overheard a girl telling her friends that she was done with the city and was just going to move to the mountains. At the time, I was 21 and hadn’t travelled much. I hadn’t gone out and done all the things I’ve done now, even though I’d always wanted to. I remember wanting to turn around and thank her, because she spoke about these big changes so casually that it made me believe I’d get there too someday; that I’d also be able to leave, as easily as she could. After I went back to Pune, I kept thinking about this girl. As a joke, I gave her a name: Evelyn. That’s who the song is about.
This is an article from the June EZ. For more such stories, grab a free copy here.
Words Hansika Lohani
Date 11.6.2026