Amir Ekbatani has returned with his brand-new single ‘Tell Me You Love Me’. The track merges his signature songwriting, his sonic interests, and preferences creating an amalgamation of genres that can be most succinctly described as indie dance.
Making his debut in 2024, Amir Ekbatani is an athlete turned artist. After surviving a catastrophic accident that caused the amputation of his left leg, he took a keen interest in music and began teaching himself vocals, keys, guitar, and production.
If there’s been a recurring theme in Amir Ekbatani’s life story, it’s that quitting is never an option. Whether it was as a disregarded high school football prospect who decided to follow his passions and wound up being a two-year starter at UCLA. Or having his life entirely turned upside down in a terrible car accident that left him with only a 2% chance of survival and left his left leg amputated. After undergoing more than a dozen operations and four years to regain his mobility, he never stopped moving and went on to have a highly successful career as a fitness trainer in Los Angeles and across the world. You can still work out with him on Apple Fitness Plus.
Sometimes you have to wake up to truly live your dream, and that’s where we find Amir Ekbatani now, fully pursuing his passion for music. As a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, he pivoted his life in a major way in 2020, going back to college for music production and engineering (Icon Collective, Berklee College of Music, LAAMP). After three years in creative incubation, he is now ready to express his deepest insights and vulnerabilities, sharing his true story through his music.
‘Tell Me You Love Me’ pays tribute to one of the best musical eras ever—the 1980s. He used an LM2 Linndrum machine and a variety of analogue synths (Juno, OBX, and Minimoog) in his studio to generate every sound on this song to accurately represent the vibe of the time. On this song, he serves as the only writer, producer, and artist, besides guitars, which were played by Nashville-based guitarist Peter Ferguson, playing and performing everything else.
Amir Ekbatani merges genres of pop, new wave, retro wave, indie-pop, and indie-rock in ‘Tell Me You Love Me’. Vocals, Roland Juno 60, Rolando Juno 106, OB-X8, Linndrum LM2, Moog Minimoog model D (all synths), and electric guitar are all used to produce the upbeat and dynamic track.
The song’s lyrics are an autobiographical description of dating in modern-day Los Angeles. Its volatility, ups and downs, and unpredictable nature. It’s almost like being a fighter jet pilot and having to dodge every potential threat to get a brief glimpse of visibility. It has to do with the excitement of the chase and the attraction of being unavailable, which afflicts a lot of us when we are young. A refuge of safety and simplicity from the overwhelming complexity of the modern world, it tells the story of the status of the union in 2024 through stories from the year 1984.
On the track, Amir Ekbatani comments, “‘Tell Me You Love Me’ is a state of the union on dating in 2024, told from the year 1984, a safe-haven sanctuary of simplicity from the overcomplexity of the present day.”
