AR Rahman, Music

On PK Mishra, The Forgotten Hero of Dubbed Lyrics

This post has been in my drafts for ages. I was trying to get citations on certain facts, but that would have required months of burrowing through old issues of Filmfare and Stardust magazines and time, which I don’t really have. It’s sad and strange that the Internet does not remember PK Mishra anymore, even though his songs ruled the airwaves back in the day. If you have any more PK Mishra facts, including what his real name was, anything at all, hit me up. He needs a Wikipedia page at least. I want us to not forget.

You are a poet from Rajasthan, and you have been trying to break into the film industry for a while. Out of the blue, you get a call. You have been employed to write the lyrics for songs in a new movie. The director is well-known in his field, and the composer is new to the game, no baggage, zero ego. You feel a thrill as you go in to your first session. Song-writing for Indian films is all about creating words and music based on a situation, a feeling, a bend in the road, an ode to the vagaries of life, and you are eager and curious to see what’s in store for you.

But what is this? You are told that the songs have already been written, in a different language, and you actually have to translate it into Hindi. Harsh, but what to do? You know the original language, so it’s not all that bad. It’s all about coming up with rhymes and verses in your mother tongue. You can roll with that, you say, and get to it.

Except there is a hitch. You cannot just translate as is, you see. The actors in the film have already shot the visuals in a different language, and you have to ensure that their lips sync with the new words as well. “What do you mean?”, you ask. “They are singing in a different language.” “Er, no, ” you are told. “They have to seem like they are singing in Hindi.” Well, fine, it’s a constraint. But you are an artist and you understand constraints, so you go about and do your job. You have to pay attention to the visuals, so that you understand at what points of the song you see lips moving, and others where you can get away with playing fast and loose. “Asha” and “Aasai” sound about the same, so that’s easy.

Another hitch. You see, the composer and director both insist that certain words have to stay the same. They match the mood perfectly, and even though they do not have any meaning per se, those words need to be around. “MTV generation, sir. Youth, sir,” you are told. “They need to latch on to something catchy, otherwise how can they remember the song?” You don’t really understand, because you saw the movie and there’s no one named ‘Rukkumani’ in it, and you try to bring up the fact that the North Indian version of the name should probably be ‘Rukmini’, but no one cares. So you shrug and you do your best.

Yet another request. There is this song , a full-blooded, goose-bump inducing song about how great….Tamil Nadu is. But the rest of India wouldn’t care, so you need to talk about the country instead. The good thing is, there is no lip-synced video, so you can go wild, and you do.


So Roja comes out, and the songs, your words accompanying them, go stratospheric. Never mind the fact that they got your name wrong on the cassette cover. Your name is not PK Mishra, they called you Mishra-ji when you came in every day, and they forgot to ask you what your first name was. When they couldn’t find you, some wit decided to put PK in there, since you came in to work a little tipsy, every now and then. Ha ha, really funny. But none of it matters, because they love the music, and those songs you wrote, they are playing on the radio, and even on Chitrahaar.

People are talking about AR Rahman, the new wonder kid from Madras, and every now and then, somebody even talks about you. But mostly, they laugh at how saucy that Rukmani song is, even though you thought it was tame by what your peers were putting forward in Hindi cinema at the time. The kid ends up winning a bunch of awards, as does the lyricist for the original songs. Nobody pays much attention to your work. After all, what you did was nothing original, anybody can translate words from one language to another, right?

But yet, it turns out that you make this a steady career. You fit a niche. There is opportunity to be seen for every producer that wants the pan-Indian market, and you are the go-to guy when it comes to transliteralipsyncizing songs into Hindi. You accede to every demand, and you do your best to play by the rules. You take it easy, as a matter of policy. Other lyricists would have run screaming for the hills if asked to write a rap song that talks about localities in Chennai, one that makes use of local references, puns, and tongue-twisters, but you gamely take on the challenge, transposing it to a different audience. For some songs, you put in the exact English words they want in the verses. Well, except for that time you thought nobody up North cared about Elizabeth Taylor so you put Madonna in there instead, but hey, it went well. You don’t bat an eyelid when they ask you to take on songs that swim in alliteration and onomatopoeia; if it’s possible in Tamil, you will find a way, any way, to get a Hindi version. You become flexible with meaning sometimes, when a song about the Goddess Kali becomes one about being the Prince of Delhi. Despite your lyrics being burdened with the broken accents of singers unaccustomed to Hindi.

The strange thing is, when given creative freedom with your translations, you go above and beyond. I look at your translated version of songs that were remade with different actors (oh yes, that was a thing too, later in the nineties) and they are so different from the ones where you need to adhere to specific imagery from the original Tamil version. You also made the best of the leeway from tracks that do not involve lip-syncing. Also interesting are the translation choices you make, like taking a song that’s about the daughters of various people in a village (can’t even) and make it one with actual women’s names. A song about a flower blooming to the touch becomes one about falling in love, but just a little. (What does that even mean, we wondered, to have thoda thoda pyaar, as opposed to dher saara pyaar? But that was you playing around with the Tamil words “thodath thoda” and picking the word transposition of least resistance. The meaningless word “Kulivalile“, shoehorned into the visuals of a film just because the composer and lyricist couldn’t think of a better word, to you that word became “Phoolwaali ne“. I don’t know whether to laugh or just be in awe of your creativity every time I hear the Hindi version.

But tell me, Mishra-ji, was there ever this feeling in the recesses of your mind, that all your work, the kind of ideas and effort you put into unraveling the cultural Gordian knot of North and South, all of it was temporary? That by transferring near-verbatim the flavor of one end of the country, you relinquished some of the ownership that comes with pure art. I am into comics, and there is this recurring joke in that field about inkers. The punchline is that inkers are not real artists, that they just trace the penciller’s work. I see that similar argument made about your contributions to Indian cinema, and pardon my language, that is such bullshit.

Maybe you realized that there will come a time when there is more money to be made in remaking films outright, using a different creative team. Perhaps you suspected that, had you continued work in purely dubbed films, you would become a relic, and those colleagues and patrons that offering you a steady assembly-line of work will switch off the lights and walk away anytime the money dried up. There were songs you were clearly phoning in, employing the bare-minimum effort to string coherent lines together.

By 1997, the writing was on the wall. Others had taken your place in the corridors of Panchathan Record Inn. You branched out among other music composers of the South. Your oeuvre included names like MM Kreem and Deva and Illayaraja, you bringing their tunes to a different market, just as you brought Rahman’s. It was interesting to see you branch off into doing original Hindi and non-Hindi films. Your work with director Mani Shankar, in particular, stemming from your collaborations with Karthik Raja. You did not burn up the charts or the box office with those, but they remain worthy snapshots of your career.

My personal favorite of your non-Rahman career however is this all-but-forgotten album called Meri Jaan Hindustaan, released in 1997, the same year ARR’s Vande Mataram appeared, with lyrics by your spiritual successor Mehboob. Pop patriotism was at a fever pitch, that fiftieth year of our independence, and one cannot fault you for climbing aboard that money train. But what a product, sir ji. Your song for Lucky Ali, ‘Anjaani Rahon Mein’, remains the most famous of them all, still accessible on YouTube. But there are others I find worthy of both mention and memory. This Chitra and MM Kreem duet called ‘Kho Jaane Do’, which had Deepti Bhatnagar and Rani Jeyaraj in the video. Karthik Raja’s ‘Sehra Baandh Ke Nikle’, a strange, almost atonal ditty punctuated with a rap section that you wrote. I have never managed to find out if you wrote the Baba Sehgal number “Howzzatt”, or the Illayaraja track with Kamal Haasan vocals ‘Apna Josh Hai’. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were so.

It is 2020, Mishraji, twenty eight years since you first brought a nation together with your words. I was a twelve year old boy in Assam when I saw your name on that cassette cover, and for the next couple of years, seeing your name on a byline made me wince and celebrate all at once. Because I did not know what to expect, and believe me, that is not a bad thing. Your words are seared in my brain, and come back to me in the strangest of moments, like when I am outside and there’s a bus across the street, I half-expect a man in red socks to come flying out the window and begin thrusting his pelvis gloriously at the world. The words accompanying the song in my head are like confused bursts of radio static, and go from Tamil to Telugu to Hindi, and of course, your words are the ones I really understand, even though it’s the other languages I mouth along. I envied the lucky folks who had access to Tamil releases, but your work helped relieve some of that FOMO. A phrase that did not even exist back then, but the feeling did, believe me.

The words you strung together felt so random sometimes, and yet when I listened closer to the Tamil versions, and pore over online translations, I realized you were not the one rhyming “sensation” with “temptation”, nor were you the one with the fishing net metaphors. You were however wholly responsible for the evocative phrase “baadal tirikit tirikit bole“.

Despite being good at your professional career and a symbol of change, you are barely a footnote to that decade of musical upheaval. Your words have now become samples of memetic derision among those that sigh over the poetry of Hindi film music. AR Rahman has always maintained a studied distance from your existence, and would rather not consider the pre-Rangeela years of his dubbed catalog as canon. Your namesake turns up when I look for you online, a gentleman associated with the current political party. There are one or two articles about your death in 2008, with the vaguest of allusions to your life other than what we already know. There is not even a picture of you available anywhere. No interviews, even though I scrounge through a multitude of YouTube channels that trade in vintage film videos. What I have figured out is that you came from Sujangarh, Rajasthan, and that you lived in Chennai for the major part of your life, and that you knew Tamil well. Or you must have. I wonder how and why you made it to the Madras film industry, of all places. There is not even a Wikipedia page for you, sir, and I have thought very hard about how I can create one. But alas, without citations and online paraphernalia, it is impossible to categorize you as a “person of note”.

And it’s sad, Mishraji, that your work does not get the sort of appreciation that it should. Without you, there wouldn’t be this cross-pollination of North and South that defined Indian film music of the nineties. At least, it wouldn’t have happened this early. You had created a path for others that followed, people with more clout who could insist on a little more respect for lyrics and their translation, getting producers to pay up for re-shoots so that the constraints on their words were loosened. You did not have that luxury, but you delivered without complaint or drama, with professional courtesy, not letting your ego get in the way of a director’s vision or a composer’s idiosyncrasy.

What remain with me are memories of conversations I have seen on random channels at random times of my life. How you proudly spoke about changing the main lyrics of Dalapathi to something more palatable in Hindi, than the exact translation that you were asked for (“Aye ladki, chutki bajaa” just didn’t have that zing, you said. ) How you felt forever cheated because they got your first name wrong on the cassette of Roja and you were stuck with it for the rest of your career – and life. And I can see you chuckling over not using “the ship of friendship” in your translation, because it just wouldn’t work in the song.

You have popped up the most random of places when I went hunting for you – is that really your voice on the Akshay Kumar version of Jhoole Jhoole Lal, from that smelly turd that is Jai Kishen? IMDB seems to think so. Your name also comes up as composer for Sapna Avasthi’s album Pardesiya.

The one question I would have liked to ask you, though, is this. Were you doing this because no one else would, or did you really enjoy it all? I would like to believe it was the latter. I would like to think that there is no way you could come up with a phrase that goes “flexible like a noodle” without chuckling to yourself, and weren’t indulging in your drink of choice when rhyming “Glaxo baby” with “BP”. Your lyrics, sir, remain among the most fun experiences of my adolescence and a pleasure (and sometimes, a pain) to revisit. Is there anyone else who will match your chutzpah when it comes to visual poetry? There is no muqabla, subhanallah.


An Incomplete PK Mishra Discography

RojaTamilRojaAR Rahman
Dharam YodhaMalayalamYodhaAR Rahman
Muthu MaharajaTamilMuthuAR Rahman
Tu Hi Mera DilTamilDuetAR Rahman
VishwavidhaataTamilPudhiya MugamAR Rahman
Humse Hai MuqablaTamilKaadhalanAR Rahman
Chor ChorTamilThiruda ThirudaAR Rahman
PriyankaTamilIndiraAR Rahman
Love BirdsTamilLove BirdsAR Rahman
HindustaniTamilIndianAR Rahman
Duniya Dilwalon KiTamilKaadhal DesamAR Rahman
Mr RomeoTamilMr RomeoAR Rahman
Aaj Ka RomeoTamilIndhuDeva
DalpatiTamilDalapathyIllayaraja
Sazaa-e-KaalapaniMalayalamKaalapaniIllayaraja
GrahanHindiOriginal movieKarthik Raja
ChhaliaTamilRaasaiyyaIllayaraja
Meri Jaan HindustaanHindiOriginal AlbumMM Kreem/various
PardesiyaHindi Original AlbumPK Mishra
Naya JigarTeluguSnehamante IderaMM Kreem
Govinda GovindaTeluguGovinda Govinda
Mitr My FriendB Illayaraja
The Smart HuntTamilVettaiyadu VillayaduHarris Jayaraj
Coffee Aur KreemHindiOriginal AlbumMM Kreem
16 DecemberKarthik Raja
MukhbiirKarthik Raja
Vellu NayakanTamilNayaganIllayaraja

Notes:

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AR Rahman, Music, Myself, Quizzing

The Rahman Quiz : Answers

The What: Hey, guess what! I am posting answers to a bunch of questions I asked seven years ago.

The What. The. Fuck: Yeah, I know. I have this bad habit of starting stuff and never finishing ’em. You know, like the rest of you fuckin’ slobs.

The Why: Because someone left a comment, and I am too nice to let comments pass by unanswered.

The Really, Why: I don’t know, man. Closure, I guess. Probably because the world is ending, one wants to wrap up unfinished business.

I thought about putting this up on Slideshare, but this was getting chatty and link-encrusted at the same time. So I figured there is no point in diverting traffic to a different site when I could just have fun in my own backyard.

Naveen is the Rahman regular on the flute/wind instruments. Who is the Rahman regular on the solo violin?

Answer

M Kalyan
Kalyan who had worked with A.R. Rahman’s father R.K. Sekar, was also part of ARR’s group right from his first film ‘Roja.’ “Rahman was a hard working boy. While working for other music directors, even during breaks, he would just stick to his keyboard and keep working on it. Highly matured even at that tender age, he was always a man of few words.”
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/music/violinist-kalyanam-traces-his-musical-journey/article19464000.ece

Note: since going international, Rahman has used different violinists while touring, notably Ann Marie Calhoun, who he worked with during the making of Superheavy, with Mick Jagger, Damien Marley et al.

A very peculiar music sample is associated with Raghuvaran’s character in Kaadhalan (Humse Hai Muqabla). The theme music of which other Rahman film begins with the same sound?

Answer
This is the sample I am talking about (the video should begin at t=39s).

And the other theme music is this one.

Note: Jesus, what a shitty piece of trivia to know, remember, and inflict on the world.

Which are the only Rahman songs that have been lip-synched on screen by
– Amrish Puri
– Kailash Kher

Answer

Amrish Puri – Chal Kheva Re Kheva from Doli Saja Ke Rakhna

Kailash Kher – Al Maddath Maula from Mangal Pandey: The Rising.

Both of the above, by the way, are relentlessly terrible songs, rendered even more so by their pedestrian videos. We can fight about that opinion, if you want.

Name the first Rahman film dubbed into Hindi to not have lyrics by PK Mishra/Mehboob.

For additional points, name lyricist.

Answer

This one falls in the category of “It depends”.

The official answer would be Rajiv Menon’s Sapnay, with lyrics by Javed Akhtar. Akhtar would also write the lyrics to Shankar’s Jeans the very next year, and from then on there was no looking back, and PK Mishra completely fell by the wayside.

However, Akhtar had written lyrics for Priyadarshan’s Kabhi Na Kabhi way back in 1994, with the film ultimately releasing in 1997.

But oops, there was also the matter of The Gentleman, released in 1994 in Hindi. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt with music composed by Anu Malik, except that three of the chart-busting songs were basically overdubs on the original ARR numbers from Shankar’s Gentleman. The songs were ‘Roop Suhana Lagtaa Hai’, lyrics by Indeevar, ‘Aashiqui Mein’ and ‘Chika Pika Rika’, with lyrics by Rajan Khera.

The promotional poster for which Rahman album had the words – “Chinna Chinna Aasai, Grammy vaanga aasai”?

Answer

Mm yeah, trick question. It’s a Rahman “album”, not really a movie OST. This was Magnasound’s reissue of Shubha’s 1991 album “Set Me Free” in 1996, at the peak of Rahman-madness. Marketed as “AR Rahman’s first international album”, listening to it now is extreme cringe, with some redeeming moments. Ok, fine, I still feel ‘Zombie’, fine?

Before Sukhvindara Singh sang in Dil Se (1998) and became a Rahman Regular, he wrote the lyrics for song 1 and sang song 2, for two 1997 films. Name both songs and movies.

Answer
The lyrics were for the surprisingly rambunctious bhangra version of ‘Daud’, sung by Usha Uthup.

He sang for both the Tamil and Telugu versions of ‘Lucky Lucky’, from Ratchagan/Rakshakudu. Incidentally the film debut of Sushmita Sen. Yup, Sukhvindara Singh started his singing career with Rahman with a Tamil song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v0IuJlDab0

The title of which song came from a Haj visit, where ARR heard a man selling water?

Answer
This is fairly easy if you know ARR apocrypha, or understand that May’i/Moy’i is Arabic for water. The song Mayya Mayya’ from Guru featured as a Turkish cabaret song, sung by Egyptian/Canadian singer Maryem Tollar.

Rahman has often spoken of the influence of Peter Gabriel’s Passion: The Last Temptation of Christ, and used the bassline of ‘Of These, Hope’ in Anbae Anbae (Jeans). In which Rahman OST would you hear a sample from Baba Maal’s ‘Call To Prayer’ from Passion: Sources, the companion album to Passion?

Answer
This is ‘Call to Prayer’ by Baaba Maal.

And this is the theme song from ‘One Two Ka Four’.

Also features Tuvan throat singing, African drums, and a Middle-eastern groove.

What is common to the soundtracks of Jeans, Bombay, Taal, Alaipayuthey and Thiruda Thiruda? Hmm, also Vande Mataram.

Answer
All of these soundtracks came in multiple versions, some with missing songs added in different releases, others with songs in CDs but not on the cassette.

The missing songs:

  • Jeans – ‘Poonagayil Thimuthi’ and ‘Jeans theme’
  • Bombay – ‘Malarodu Malarillai’ and ‘Idhu Innai Bhoomi’. Also, the second version of the album had Remo’s chanting included in the Tamil version of ‘Humma’.
  • Taal – ‘Kya Dekh Rahe Ho Tum’
  • Alaipayuthey – ‘Endendrum Punnagayi’ and ‘Mangalyam’ were not in the original albums, but added after the movie came out
  • Thiruda Thiruda – title track, ‘Aathukulla Ayira Meenu’
  • Vande Mataram – ‘Musafir’ and ‘Masoom’, released in the international version. ‘Musafir’ was essentially Otthagatha Kattikko (Roop Suhana Lagta Hai) remixed into English. Incidentally Rahman performed ‘Masoom’ at the Independence Day concert the night of 15th August 1997. Not seeing the song on the album made me the sole person to own a bootleg version of ‘Masoom’, which I had recorded on my walkman from my TV.

Name two (non-pop) male and female singers who have sung only one song for ARR.

Answer
Male: Kumar Sanu and Roopkumar Rathod. Bonus: Babul Supriyo and Nabarun Ghosh.

Nabarun Ghosh – Sun Le O Janam (Tu Hi Mera Dil)

Female: Parul Mishra, Sapna Mukherjee, Kavita Paudwal

This one is tough. Initially I thought Deena Chandradas qualified for ‘Zehreela Pyaar’ in Daud. However, he sang for the dubbed versions too, disqualifying him. Suresh Wadkar sang for Rangeela, imagine my surprise when I found out that he sang the Marathi version of the Roja title track.

Sowmya Raoh was a contender for the female singer – she sang for Godfather, but turns out she also sang a song in Guru. (‘Shaouk Hai’, which does not feature in the original release of the album, so that’s another addition to the list above). So was Sandhya JK, P Susheela’s daughter-in-law, who sang Poo Kodiyin in Iruvar, but also the Telugu version.

Danny Boyle recommended song Z for the end sequence of Slumdog Millionaire, but Rahman insisted on ‘Jai Ho’, wchich was originally composed for a situation in film X, where the director chose the song Y instead. ID X, Y and Z.

Answer
Z: ‘Aaj Ki Raat’, from DonThe Chase Begins Again

Aaj Ki Raat

X and Y – Yuvvraaj and ‘Shaano Shaano’.

Shanno Shanno

It’s ok to throw up in your mouth a little, after that last song.

In an interview, ARR complained that this song X used a sample that crashed his software a record number of times (vague memory says 21). The sample was reused by artist Y as the opening song Z of an album released 2 years later. Incidentally, ARR worked with Y’s lead guitarist around that time, so that might explain this. Once again, ID X, Y and Z.

Answer
Unfortunately this is one of those answers where you will have to take my word for it. This was from some Filmfare interview I read. ARR was moving away from hardware sequencers to software in 1997-98 and among the songs that he made for Daud, with Ramgopal Verma, this one kept crashing his software.

Sting’s Brand New Day album had a song called ‘A Thousand Years’ that used the same drum sample in the beginning. Sting guitarist Dominic Miller worked with Rahman on the Vande Mataram album.

What was the first authorized remix of a Rahman track?
Who remixed it?

(Authorized: appeared on the official album)

Answer
This was Yak Bondy’s remix of Chaiyya Chaiyya, called ‘Thaiyya Thaiyya’, that appeared on the Dil Se album, featuring lyrics by Tejpal Kaur. It’s still a fascinating version of the chart-buster, where Bondy uses key elements of ARR’s production to create a sparse, minimalist song where Sukhwinder’s voice holds sway. Incidentally, on the Telugu dub of Dil Se, the main song is called Thaiyya Thaiyya while the remix is called Chaiyya Chaiyya. Go figure.

(this is based on the assumption that ‘Missing’ is not a remix of ‘Revival’ from Vande Mataram, but a different version altogether.

During the opening credit sequence of Rangeela, we hear the sounds of a Bombay street as the cast and production names roll. What do you hear when Rahman’s name flashes on screen?

Answer
Muqabla Muqabla, lol. Don’t take my word for it, go check the opening credits.

Which AR Rahman OST saw its CD release on a German label known for manufacturing Varese Sarabande releases for non-US markets?

Answer

Easy: Which OST features Rahman and Himesh Reshammiya together?

Answer

So, Bappi Lahiri claimed that the Hindi song B was a rip-off of his song A. A however bears more than a passing similarity to a 1974 number C. Strangely, the definitive site on Indian Music copycats mention that a Tamil song by ARR, D was inspired by C.
Identify A, B, C, D.

Answer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7JsIvYvsFA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onFDJgYy9BQ

By Rahman’s own admission (and a mention in one of his biographies), which album did he compose in the shortest period of time?
6 days, if I remember right.
And a damn fine album it is, too.

Answer
No citation again. Karuthamma, by Bharthiraja.

The name of which Rahman song translates to “The Chosen One”

Answer
So AR Rahman’s scores, in addition to rocking my adolescence with their music, have also led to an education in Islam-related factoids, especially with the man’s choice of song titles. Who would have thought that ‘Kun Faya Kun’ refers to the creation of all existence? Did anyone know that the word ‘Fanaa’ means ‘annihilation of the self’, before the song made an appearance in an ARR song?

So yeah, “the chosen one”? This song. Incidentally a track whose visuals can be interpreted as one of the greatest same-sex anthems ever made in Indian cinema.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhgpf2ikOWY

“When we did (film) A, we had a song in the beginning and we used (song) B while shooting and editing. We went through HMV and asked for the rights to B and they quoted 1 crore rupees. We said “forget it”, composed a new piece C and it came out fine. Much later, they asked us permission to use (song) D. We quoted exactly the same figure.”
Who, talking about what?

Answer
Mani Ratnam is the “who”. As for the what….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdS5qckKg3w

Ok everyone, in case you liked what you saw, please like, comment, and subscr…no. *Seppuku intensifies*

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Books, Music

Reading At the End of the World: Daisy Jones & The Six

Midway through reading Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s oral history of a fictional rock and roll band from the 70s, I feel this desperate urge to pause and listen to the Fleetwood Mac album Rumors. It was not a normal, hey-I-need-to-check-this-out feeling, it was somewhat akin to craving for a drink on a hot summer day, when you lick your lips and want that first swig of a cold beer to fill that ferocious vacuum in your head and belly all at the same time.

If you read the book, and get to the portion where the band’s seminal album ‘Aurora’ is being made, you may understand why. Of course, you also need to know something about Rumors, in order to make sense of the relationships unraveling on the page and how this very real album, to me, seemed like the only piece of musical history that could provide the musical resonance the book needed. I listened to the first few songs from Rumors, skipped to ‘Songbird’, a track that lacerates and heals my heart every time I have played it in the last twenty-odd years, and then carried on reading.

It is incredible how great the format of the book works for the subject. It is completely immersive, and visual in a way that most books try to be, but do not succeed. The picture that emerges from the juxtaposition of multiple people talking about the same sequence of events, with viewpoints switching in near-real time, makes it feel like I am reading a transcript of a documentary video. Reid captures the distinct voices of the characters in an incredible manner — no one is peripheral, and while the bulk of the focus is on the talented duo of Daisy Jones and Brian Dunne, it is the reactions of characters like Eddie and Camille that garnishes the story, shows you the debris the main characters leave behind, and enriches our experience. The experience, just so you know, is not just that of music, or love, or drug-fueled tours, it’s about the way the writer manages to capture the zeitgeist of the seventies, and a female perspective to rock and roll that I have not seen outside of Patti Smith’s autobiographies. The way the characters of Daisy, Karen, Simone, and Camilla are so different, and do not exist as cliches or tropes of the genre, is astonishing to say the least.

My favorite moment in the book comes when the author (not Jenkins Reid, but the fictional author of this fictional band) breaks character, with a short note explaining why, and the pages that come after not only signal the beginning of the end, but also gives you an idea of where things are about to go. Like turning the viewfinder of a lens that brings a blurry image into focus. It ends with a letter from a mother, and then all the lyrics of the songs in Aurora, one after the other, in the order of appearance in the album.

It is not surprising to learn that Amazon Studios is working on a TV adaptation of the book, and I have no doubt the production team has a tough time ahead of them. And it’s not just the music, it’s about adapting the iconography the book flaunts — be it Daisy’s drug-fueled vulnerability, or the way her voice changes on the fifth take of ‘Impossible Girl’, or the visual description of the album cover shoot of Aurora. It will be hard to match up to what’s in our heads when we read the book, and I am not holding my breath.

But what got me grinning like an idiot was reading the acknowledgements by the author (Jenkins Reid this time), and finding this dedication to her husband:

To Alex: It was hard to know where to acknowledge you because you have your hand in every aspect of this story. You came up with the idea with me, taught me about music theory, listened to Rumours with me, fought about Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie with me, gave up a job to be home more, became the primary parent, and read the book approximately nine million times. And most of all, you make it easy to write about devotion. When I write about love, I write about you. We’re ten years into this party and I’m still mad for you.

Turns out the entire framework of the book is based on the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks dynamic!

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Music, Today I Learned

Sakhi Maro/Tu Mera Dil

I listen to a lot of music. This is known.

A byproduct of that is that for long periods of time, certain artistes take on more, or very little, prominence in my playlists, a function of recent release schedules, my soundscape mood (there are times when nu-retro reigns supreme on my headphones, for example, or ambient anime piano), and pure serendipity.

The third factor, that of serendipity is what leads to goosebumps, when a song that I haven’t heard in a long while suddenly emerges front and center. Today was one such day, when a tune from Susheela Raman’s Love Trap, an album that defined 2004-05 for me, materialized in my head, and of course, I had to play the album from beginning to end. I was going about my morning with a smile and a skip, as song after song came on, releasing dopamine hits and unlocking half-buried aural memories. Suddenly, it was ‘Sakhi Maro’ on the speakers. If you know the song, you know it melts you like butter on a warm slice of bread. But today, out of all the times I have heard ‘Sakhi Maro’, I realized that the opening bars of the song reminded me of something else. Another song.

But what did it remind me of? I paused the song for a bit and thought about what exactly brought about that stray memory? It was definitely not Susheela’s voice or the tune itself. When I played it again from the beginning, it hit me. The gentle, melodic strumming that is the bedrock of the track reminded me of a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track from one of his collaborations with Michael Brook. There being two of those albums – Musst Musst and Night Song. A bit of quiet contemplation brought me to the exact track. It was the opening track to Night Song, called ‘My Heart, My Life’, with the exact same strumming that was part-guitar, part-harp.

Now I had always thought most sounds on the Brook albums were the Infinite Guitar, the musician’s own modification of the electric guitar. As it turned out, the sound on both the songs was a West African instrument called the Kora. It has 21 strings and has features of a lute and a harp. And once you hear a kora and realize how versatile it is, it’s hard to ever miss it. Tom Diakite plays the instrument on ‘Sakhi Maro’, Kaouding Cissoko from Senegal plays it on ‘My Heart, My Life’. On both the tracks, these guys steal the bulk of the thunder.

Here’s a minute long video that shows how the same instrument produces different kinds of sounds, demoed by musician Toumane Diabate.

And here’s an hour-long concert that’s a cello-kora duet featuring Ballake Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal.

On an aside, the MTV Unplugged version of ‘Sakhi Maro’ has Sam Mills playing the guitar on the track, which added to my confusion. The track also features renowned percussionist and singer Kutle Khan on vocals and the khartal, making it arguably better than Susheela’s original interpretation.

I cannot but be awed by the things that I still do not know, and by the secrets these familiar friends from decades ago still manage to unravel.

(Also, this is the second time in a year that I have gone back to Susheela Raman on the blog. That must count for something!)

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Music

you open the door to another door to another door

The title of this post is a reference to my first new album of 2020. Which came to me in a dream, believe it or not.

So this is what happened. I was lying on the bed reading (the third book of Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy, called Solea, after the Miles Davis album), with Spotify playing over my headphones. At some point, I drifted off, floating along with the music in that happy blissful state of lucid dreams and semi-awareness. When you know that you are asleep but you haven’t quite lost control yet.

I found myself hovering back into reality, coaxed out by this beautiful voice singing, and through the haze of my not-quite-nap. The song meshed with the random visuals in my head, in the best way possible. “Caroline Polachek”, I read on the phone. The song was called “Door”, and committing that to memory, half-worrying that maybe I was still dreaming all this, I fell back to sleep.

I played the song later that evening, in the car. The chorus was like hot chocolate and pine-wood smoke, smooth, sophisticated, but very tender. But hold on, the voice sounded familiar. I have heard her before. I stop the car on the side of the road and google the artiste’s name.

Yup, Caroline Polachek was the singer on the Brooklyn band Chairlift, whose album Moth was one of my favorites of 2015-2016. It also so happened that despite buying tickets to their show at the Observatory, and driving 45 miles one Sunday evening to see them, I couldn’t. Because the show was cancelled. I got my money back, but the tinge of regret remained with me. More so because they disbanded a year later, in 2017, after playing a final show in Brooklyn.

And now, four years later, Ms Polachek has released a solo album, called Pang. It released in October, and for whatever reason, I had no idea of its existence until two weeks ago. Of course, in that time span, I have heard the album an umpteen number of times. I love every minute of it, from the haunted opening of ‘The Gate’ flowing into the title track ‘Pang’, to the closing notes of the tender ‘Parachutes’. Even though I could recognize her voice on the album, the mood, and the production were both very different from that on the Chairlift albums. For one, this was clearly an album about love and heartbreak and all of the feelings. It’s an album where slide-guitar licks morph into dance patterns, otherworldly beats and rhythms coalesce into splashes of intensity and adrenaline, and through all of these, Caroline’s voice weaves and wends through various moods and tonalities, gentle whispers to full-throated vocal riffs that advertise absolute control. And possibly a fair degree of auto-tune, but the electronic effects are tweaked to just the perfect degree of alien and human.

This is one of those rare album that feels like each track is better than the previous one. No wonder, then, that the first single, and accompanying video, was ‘Door’, which is the penultimate track of 15 songs, and runs a radio-unfriendly 5 minutes and 23 seconds. But it goes places. believe me, both visually and in sound and mood. The opening guitar riff, and the way the beat builds up slowly into that chorus is sublime. The alien vocal echoes on the word “door”. The guitar bridge. And that final humming that closes the track. Holy shit.

My personal favorite in the album, at the moment, is ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’. Many reasons, including the upbeat 80s vibe, the catchy vocal riff that begins the track, the “woo” when she sings the chorus, that sharp intake of breath just before she sings “I get a little lonely”. And of course that semi-awkward, all-Caroline dance routine in the video, so reminiscent of ‘Ch-ching’ from the Moth album. The chorus, when I first heard it, sounded like “Show me the banana”, and I ran to check what it actually said. “Show me the love, nanana”. Pooh. I prefer “show me the banana”.

I could listen to it all day, except ‘Door’ starts playing just after, and then once the album finishes with the downtempo ‘Parachute’, I have to go back to track one again.

‘Ocean of Tears’ comes closest to the Chairlift sound. You could play the opening to me and I would have identified the song as one of theirs. Of course it’s fantastic, the bass throbs and then the rock guitars playing over the chorus.

Caroline plays at the Fonda Theater on February 1, and even though tickets are sold out, something tells me I will show up there, somehow.

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