Ketaki Mategaonkar turns music director with her debut album ‘Mai’

Renowned playback singer and actor Ketaki Mategaonkar announced Thursday that she has donned the hat of a music director. Accompanied by her mother, Suvarna Mategaonkar, Ketaki released the first song of her debut album ‘Mai’, sung by Padma Shri winner Suresh Wadkar.

At a press conference at the Pune Shramik Patrakar Sangha, Ketaki said that all the songs in her album have been written by her great-grandmother whom she used to call “Mai”, thus the title. The album is based on the ‘spiritual genre’ and has songs sung by some of the most well-known singers in the country like Padma Shri winner Shankar Mahadevan, Suresh Wadkar, Mahalaxmi Iyer, Pt Raghunandan Panshikar, and her mother Suvarna Mategaonkar. The other artists in the album include Meenal Mategaonkar and Ashay Mategaonkar.

Ketaki started composing when she was five or six years old but never took it “seriously.”

She said that within a span of nine months, her YouTube channel has crossed 100,000 subscribers and after receiving positive feedback from her fans on the spiritual songs sung by her, she decided to release all the songs of her newly composed album on the channel, with one song to be uploaded every month.

“We have not had many women music composers in recent years. Notable exceptions are Lata Mangeshkar, Usha Khanna, Meena Khadilkar and Vaishali Samant. This picture needs to change and I feel that women working in the field of music must try to get into music direction. Listeners will appreciate good compositions from the women composers,” she said.

Ketaki started composing when she was five or six years old but never took it “seriously.” However, in 2016, after her first attempt at composition was highly appreciated by music veterans Suresh Wadkar and Ashok Patki, she got the “inspiration and motivation to do this album.”

She added that she chose the ‘spiritual genre’ for her first album because according to her, “there are some genres and ragas which have a positive and healing effect on us, and after the pandemic, this aspect became very important for her.”

However, she confirmed that her future albums won’t be limited to this genre and will expand to “ ghazal, romantic song and songs in different languages which will be releasing in coming months.”

“While I am an actress and a singer, music is a form of escapism which lets me express my emotions. Therefore, becoming a composer is bliss for me.”

– Stay updated with the latest Pune news. Follow Express Pune on Twitter here and on Facebook here. You can also join our Express Pune Telegram channel here.