Nasir Bhanpuri is not a record producer. He’s never been high out of his mind with depraved rock stars in a Four Seasons hot tub; he’s never even been inside a studio. He’s a data scientist at a health care systems company, where he develops models to predict patients’ hospital needs. But on a fall night in 2014, in the back room of Schubas — a small, low-ceilinged venue on Chicago’s North Side — he caught a show by his friends in Bombadil, a quirky North Carolina folk-pop band. In the dressing room after the show, he had a conversation with the band that made him think about music the way he usually thinks about health care: What makes one Bombadil song more popular than another, and what if he could predict that?
Bhanpuri knew the band in its earliest incarnations — as experimental, Bolivian-inspired undergraduates at Duke University who wore outlandish costumes and played novelty songs about death and caterpillars. But a decade later, on this particular night in Chicago, they played mostly love songs — and Bhanpuri wondered why.
They seem to be more popular, Daniel Michalak, the lead singer, told Bhanpuri after the show. “They had this hunch from getting feedback when they were performing, but it hadn’t really been quantified,” Bhanpuri said. He was a guy who could quantify things.
