It’s minutes before show time and Badshah sounds like he has just woken up from deep sleep. Droopy-eyed and sniffing, he taps the screen of his phone, takes his earpods out and says, “I was catching up on Sacred Games. I didn’t get time to see it until now because I’d been working on my album.” Already, the crowds at Phoenix MarketCity’s atrium have swelled, expecting the party anthems the singer is known for. (“Here we are now, entertain us.”)
“I don’t prepare for a live show,” remarks a nonchalant Badshah. “It’s a very two-way process, I feed off the energy of the crowd.” The singer has recently released an album, titled O.N.E, that he worked on for the past two years. “It’s been getting great response,” he says. ‘Heartless’, the only song in the album for which a video has been shot, already has over 35,876,041 views on YouTube.
“It’s a song that I wrote back in 2005, when I was in college. It was supposed to be about a relationship facing the challenges of long-distance,” he says. However the director of the video had other plans. “He turned this ballad into a song about a relationship between a fan and an artiste. I got quite emotional when I saw his vision of the song,” he says. As Badshaah videos go, it’s less aggressive, and softer, but just as self-aggrandising.
All the 17 songs in the album are out, some of them as personal as ‘Heartless’, the others, such as ‘She move it like’ with the same commercial catchy hook that shot ‘Mercy’ to fame. “There’s a song called ‘Therapy’ in the album, the writing for that one is my most intimate yet,” he says. For ‘Therapy’, released as a single a year ago, Badshah turned nostalgic, rapping about how the entertainment industry has changed him. The song is dipped in self-deprecation, while at the same time, puts on a defensive front against his critics.
More interestingly, it nods at his now kaput friendship with Yo Yo Honey Singh, expressing regret at their fight. “That is the one song I would never want a video for. I want the audience to just listen to it, and I leave it up to their imagination to make it their own story,” says Badshah. He is waiting for his fans’ reactions to the rest, after which he will decide which song deserves a video. For the most part, however, they are not the commercial club numbers we’ve come to expect. Was it the birth of his daughter that revealed this softer side of his? “No, I don’t think that has hit me yet. I’m still the same,” he says.
After dropping singles for movies for so long now, the album, he says, has helped him establish his street cred. “After a long time, I felt like an independent musician again: creating a body of work just for myself and my listeners, not for a film, not for money… The last time I did that was when I released my first song, back when I had no fans and no expectations,” he says.
At the performance, he sang two songs from the album, ‘Heartless’ and ‘Nain’, along with the peppy ‘Chull’, ‘Mercy’, ‘DJ Wale Babu’, and ‘Tamma Tamma’ among others. All the while, keeping up the ‘swag’ he is famous for. “I come from a humble background, where my family was struggling to be called middle class. Confidence is the biggest swag, and that comes with success, which is subjective. Once you have it, you don’t mind flaunting it,” he quips.