 |
 |
 |
| |
|
| |
|
|
| Saturday, April 19, 2008 |
|
For those of you who don't know, I'm the scary half of the music director duo known as Vishal and Shekhar. Together, we are responsible for the five songs on the TASHAN soundtrack. I've been reading, with great interest, all the reviews and comments the music has garnered over the last couple of days. I'm not even gonna address the ones who think Kareena's too thin. That's not my business. (For the record, I think she's smokin' hot!!) :-) But, I would like to talk about the songs, for the simple reason that I love them!
So, a lot of people have been saying a lot of things about Tashan. I love that, too! I've been reading a banned biography about Dhirubhai Ambani, and there's a bit about how he enjoyed causing a bit of a rumpus amongst his opponents/detractors. He used a beautiful term for it. "Bichhu Chhor Diya"!
I wouldn't go as far as that, but I am enjoying the surprise a lot of people have registered upon hearing the songs. Descriptions have varied from "brilliant", "radical" and "envelope-pushing" to "uncouth" and "bizarre", with one listener even asking the profound question, "is that music?" Now that the songs are a huge hit, now that the soundtrack is selling like crazy, and now that most people love it, I'd like to answer that question.
I'd like to say "yes!". Not only is it music, it's music of the most kickass kind! It's new, it's fresh, it's fun, it's surprising and it makes you think a bit! At least as far as we're concerned, that's what it's meant to be. We got an opportunity to display some heartland-rock chops, so we pulled out the stops. I don't mean to say you HAVE to like it, but if you don't, you're gonna regret it when you get home and the songs are buzzing around in your head! LOL!!
Seriously, though, we enjoyed every bit of the making of this soundtrack, and we enjoy listening to it. It's refreshing! For those of you interested, i'd like to talk about the songs one by one.
1. Dil Haara: Victor (That's Vijay Krishna Acharya to you), asked us for a love song. A love song that bites! He was clear about the almost sufi-esque devotional nature of the love he wanted to portray. We have a great love for Sufi music, so we came up with a bunch of tunes, and after Shekhar and I filtered them ruthlessly, this one survived. We played it to him, just a guitar and our voices, and we could see from his face that we were headed in the right direction. Adi came in to hear the song, loved it, but brought a new dimension to it. He heard something we hadn't, a sorta circular nature to the composition. We started to jam with that idea in mind, and somewhere along the way, Adi came up with a phrase that became the first line of the chorus. We took it from there, and it became what it is. We asked Piyush Mishra to come in and hear it, and he loved it. He came back the next day with the lyrics as you hear them. I thought they were some of the most beautiful, magical words I've ever heard, especially the two antaras. Shekhar and I also tripped out on "Tabadtod". We'd never heard that word in a song before! Then came the time to arrange it. We've been working with an absolute genius called Abhijit Nalani since Jhankaar Beats, and as always, the three of us started messing around with samples, grooves, beats, bass lines, until we came up with what is the signature riff of the song, and now, of the film. Once I heard the sampled guitar line, I immediately thought of a group of guttural chorus singers, and the "Wo-ho!" chant. We put down about six or eight layers of my voice doing that, and that's the way it stayed. We never got around to bringing more people in, because it just sounded right. As far as the guitars go, We called in a friend of ours, Warren Mendonsa, who flew in from New Zealand to record the album with us. Drums on this song, as well as all the middle-eastrn percussion you hear, have been played by T2 a remarkable Bombay based musician. Once all this was done, we brought in a magician-cum-maniac called Sukhvinder Singh! He just took it to a new dimension! Any of you wondered why the song ends in that manic crescendo? Because Victor told us that he needed a moment of sublime madness, but a silent moment where the character is at absolute peace!! How often do you guys think someone's brief is so beautifully contrary to the obvious? That ending, and of course, everything else I've mentioned, make this song one of my all-time favourites!
2. Chhaliya: A song where Kareena's character goes from soft, sensual girl to fiery woman in the blink of an eye. The mukhda starts out really mellow, with a subdued beat, but when the chorus comes along, the song changes, just like the character does. It explodes into an almost-threatening posture! This was pretty much the substance of the brief, and we played it almost exactly like this. We arranged this song once with Jackie (The guy who rocked OSO for us), but we needed to change it as we weren't a 100% yet. Jackie was busy the next day, so we called Abhijit in again, and he re-programmed the song, using some of Jackie's ideas and a lot of his own. Somewhere along the way, Victor came by the studio, and told us about the character, how she was to be surrounded by leery men, and the "Naseela Naseela" bit just jumped outta that! Piyushbhai was around, so both Shekhar and I insisted that he record it. If there's any one person who can sing an almost-Bhojpuri line with the attitude of a hip-hop gangsta, it's him! And then, came Sunidhi! She always rocks it, she did it again!
3.Dil Dance Maare Re: What a song! The energy of all the autorickshaws in Bombay flows thru this one! Why is it the way it is? You'll have to ask Victor. There's a place in the film, and I can't tell you where without giving it away, that the three characters played by Akshay, Saif and Kareena find themselves in a bhojpuri item song in Englisss. The song is based on popular Bhojpuri folk melody, with utterly deranged lyrics, that I myself have had the honour and pleasure of writing. We put the mukhda together in Shekhar's car, en-route to YRF Studios in Andheri. Victor heard it and loved it, so pretty much there and then, based on the situation, we put the antara together. The film had, by now, revealed to us it's direction in terms of sound, and so we just needed to amp it up for this one. Once again Abhijit, and Warren brought their superb musical minds to the song, and gave it a totally new dimension. While we were working on the song, I came up with the second verse. I actually had an option ready for the "tohra dil ka theater maa....." line, just in case everyone flipped out when they heard it! Luckily, they loved it! Sukhwinder came in and totally nailed it, so did Udit and Sunidhi, as you can plainly hear. I hope you all think of how much fun we had putting this song together when you hear it! 'Cuz I can feel it in every "Jaalim Beat!"
4. Falak Tak: This is actually the first song we composed for Tashan, believe it or not. Victor wanted a song that was innocent and pure, almost childlike. We were bouncing some ideas around when I found this one on my phone. I had put it down without thinking while Shekhar and I were in Madras a week or two earlier (we'd gone to record "Ajab Si" for OSO). I had just the first lines, Shekhar put his head to it and we completed it right then. Victor loved it, so did Adi, and we had started to define our Tashan in musical notes. While it was first composed, it was arranged almost last, because the other songs were so instinctive to us, and flowed so seamlessly from start to end, that the acts of composing, arranging, recording them kinda blended seamlessly. So this innocent little love song got left behind, in a manner of speaking. But I'm glad it went that way, because that's what prevented us from going the straight-and-narrow with this one. By the time we got around to arranging this song, Shekhar, Abhijit and I all knew that this was gonna be a really different sounding soundtrack, and so this song couldn't sound like love songs usually do. We brought Warren in again, and Raju Sardar and friends on the Dholaks. The Dholak pattern on "Falak" is something we've never heard before, a straight-up dholak beat, interrupted every two bars with a sound that has been misinterpreted as a clap, but which is actually the sound of six Dholak chaati's being struck with the fingernails, sort of how duffs are played. If I've bored you with the technical details, forgive me. We enjoyed it then, and we enjoy talking about it now. The song's also got an almost R&B bassline (which Shekhar came up with), most unusual for such an Indian song. Listen carefully and you'll hear some amazing guitar syncopation too. I have to say, here, that Shekhar, apart from being a great (and modest, unlike yours truly) composer, creates, with alarming regularity, the most awe-inspiring basslines. This is why our dance songs rock like they do. And Shekhar will be the first to credit Mr. Tony Vaz (who used to play with Panchamda, and played some songs with Shekhar early on) for teaching him how to do that. As to why we asked Udit to sing this song, we needed innocence, and I don't think, with possible exception of Rahat fateh Ali Khan and KK, that I've heard a voice as innocent and pure as his in our time.
5. Tashan Mein: Victor wanted a tarantino-esque, sufi-esque, qawwali-esque rock song, where two distinctively different types of voice play off each other to create, and subtly define the vibe of the film. I kid you not! We got all this from him. It may seem complex, but when a director is able to describe, even in rough terms, what he wants, it makes life as a composer easy. This song was also recorded much later, because they didn't need it to shoot with. It's a background piece, so we could go anywhere with it. So the song starts with an almost American-Indian vocal phrase, with cowboys-from-hell guitars by Randolph Correia (from Pentagram), and Gino Banks (son of the keyboard great, Louiz Banks) on the drums. The mukhda was written and composed by me, early one morning, at home. Gave my wife a start!! :-) I wanted it to be a happy, yet dark song, sorta like the universe doing a mad Tashan-dance, if that makes any sense to anyone! I sang it to Shekhar over the phone, he loved it, so we sang it to Victor, who loved it too. We then presented it to Adi, who expressed reservations. He
thought it might be too out-there for general consumption. I have to say this, even at the risk of sounding like a suck-up, but Adi is a great producer. He saw our conviction, realised we were truly enjoying it, and let us have it our way. It takes courage and conviction to let people do their jobs even against your own first instinct, and that is truly what makes working for YRF such a pleasure for us. I know, looking in from the outside, it seems like a giant corporation, but on the inside, it's a bunch of good people who love films, and music. Can't ask for more than that!
So, what's the point of this little rant? I dunno! They said people might like to hear about the music from my point of view, so here it is. It'd be great to hear back from any/all of you reading this! Look forward to it! Cheers-V. |
| |
| Posted by Vishal Dadlani at 19:00 IST |
 View Comments |
Post Comment |
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
Last Post: |
|
|
|
|
| They have made some of Bollywood’s biggest stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and Priyanka Chopra dance to their tunes (literally). Their style of music is unique and reflects their personalities to the T. They are responsible for bringing in a new sound in Bollywood with some pulsating tracks in films like Dus, Bluffmaster, Jhankaar Beats, Salaam Namaste and Om Shanti Om. We are talking about none other than the rocking music director duo of Vishal- Shekhar who are currently ruling the roost in Hindi film industry. Bollywood Hungama brings you this talented duo sharing their views on music, cinema and else. Don’t miss reading Vishal – Shekhar’s blog only on your favorite Bollywood website Bollywood Hungama.com |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
