A few days before the nation-wide lockdown, Hriday Gattani got on a flight from Chennai to Mumbai. He had no particular purpose of visit then. “I don’t know if it was some intuition,” he says, “I just came back home, and the lockdown began.”
Since then, it has been good going for the musician, who has used the time to re-invent himself. “I did a lot of working out and yoga. I also had a lot of time playing and practising my instruments and working on my production skills.”
The last few days, especially, has seen a flurry of activity in Hriday’s life. He has been receiving appreciation for the two tracks he has sung in the AR Rahman-composed Dil Bechara, which released last week.
“For me, this journey started two years ago. I remember wanting to assist Rahman sir on a project, and he gave me the brief for a couple of songs. At that point, I didn’t even know what the project was. But in the first two weeks that followed, he had cracked all the melodies,” recalls Hriday, “He was excited about this from day one and wanted it to be special.”
A fitting farewell
From there on, it was giving time to the tunes to “let it become bigger than what it is”. Hriday himself has a double association with the film: as a music supervisor and as the voice behind two songs (‘Mein Tumhara’ and ‘Maskhari’). “The first was among the initial set of tunes, but ‘Maskhari’ came almost after the entire film was done. I did the scratch version for the song, and am glad that it was used in the final list.”
The bigger challenge, for Hriday, was his role as the music supervisor, overseeing the title track, composed and sung by Rahman. “As a supervisor, you have to be objective and not be star-stuck. Rahman sir had recorded the title himself, sitting in a room all by himself. But when he came out and played it to us, it sounded fabulous,” says Hriday.
Hriday is almost 30, but still considers himself part of the ‘cassette and CD generation’. “Back then, when we had radio and tapes, music was a ‘primary activity’,” says the musician, who has done a course on vocal techniques in Chennai’s KM Music Conservatory. “Now, that has changed because we’re working and listening to music. This makes the song hooks and catchy lyrics very important.”
That seems to have been cracked with the title track of Dil Bechara, whose music video has clocked more than 40 million views on YouTube. Most of the project was filled with love and happiness, until the recent news of the death of lead actor Sushant Singh Rajput. “Though I’ve never met him, I felt like I was a part of his life, having watched rushes of the film multiple times while working on the music. It’s very unfortunate, but all we can do now is to give our best to the film, to give him a fitting send-off.”