The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
The first song of Roja that Mani Ratnam himself heard was ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’.
‘I was stunned,’ the director remembers. ‘There are rumours that “Tamizha Tamizha” was the first song of the film because he had composed it with Bharat Bala before Roja as an anthem of sorts, a Tamil empowerment song. But that isn’t true. He had composed it before, yes, but we decided to use it for Roja much later, after we’d finalized most of the other songs. And even then, it wasn’t anything like the original “Tamizha Tamizha” he’d created. It was changed quite a bit to suit the context of the film.’
It is part of the AR legend, of course, that directors have to wait to receive their music from him. Yes, they do, usually—and the waiting period can vary from hours to months. But this isn’t something that happened because Rahman got busier over the years (he was always busy), became more arrogant (he hasn’t) or just started running out of ideas (he has far from run out of ideas). This was the case right from day one.
The first schedule of the shooting of Roja was in a village in Kerala near a large waterfall by a village called Chalakudy. It is a staple shooting location for Mani Ratnam; he has shot portions of several of his films there including 2010’s Raavan/Raavanan and 2004’s Kannathil Muthamittal.
The first schedule of Roja included the scenes of Rishi and Roja meeting for the first time as well as a couple of songs, including ‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ and ‘Rukkumani Rukkumani’.
The small glitch was that ‘Rukkumani Rukkumani’ was not yet ready.
‘Rahman didn’t have it completed during that schedule,’ Mani remembers, smiling about it all these years later. ‘We had to shoot it later, during another schedule. I called him up and asked him “Man, where is the song?” and he just said, “You’re not here. You’ve gone off to shoot. How can I finalize the song and send it to you if you’re not here to listen to it and okay it?”’
Rahman is ever the perfectionist. If there is one core value that he subscribes to when it comes to his work, it is that. He doesn’t care how long it takes to ‘get it right’ and he’s totally unaffected by the pressure on him to deliver. It isn’t disregard, but if he feels it’s going to take a while to make his music the best it can possibly be, he has absolutely no qualms about making you wait till he gets it there. And he doesn’t see why you should have a problem waiting either.
The process of creating and refining each piece of music can get drawn out over a (sometimes inordinately) long period of time. Consider the story of ‘Jaage Hain’, the song that would become the backbone of Mani Ratnam’s 2007 Hindi drama Guru. Rahman spent a whole night working on just the first two notes of the chorus. He sat at his keyboard and played them again and again and again until he was happy with it—until he believed it was perfect.
‘Yes, he takes a long time,’ says S.P. Balasubrahmanyam. ‘But why not, is my question, if the result is extremely good. The delay is not because he’s lazy, but because he is overworking himself on his song.’
Consider, for instance, the case of the soundtrack album of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar in 2011. It took AR quite a while to prepare the movie’s music, but when you listen to the end product you’ll know why. The film boasted a magnificent score and several stellar songs packed into what is, arguably, Rahman’s finest soundtrack. And Imtiaz Ali would go on to collaborate with AR on his next two projects, Highway and Tamasha.
(The title of AR’s best album ever, taking into consideration a number of reliable inputs, is a close competition between Bombay, Rockstar and Dil Se.)
‘AR knows what he wants and he doesn’t stop until he gets it,’ says Mani Ratnam. ‘He’s very focused. There could be a line of people waiting outside his studio, some of them with small problems, some of them with serious issues, but he’s not going to get distracted by that. If he feels his music is not up to scratch, he’s not going to let it go until he’s satisfied with it.’
‘Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it’s quick,’ says Imtiaz Ali. ‘If there’s a lack of clarity in my brief it takes longer. Rahman sir never settles, you see. Until the music is good, he will just not give it to you. If he is not satisfied with it, he will not give it to you. And it’s hell or high water, sometimes. He knows when the song is not ready.’
Imtiaz also adds, ‘He would have developed twenty-five tunes before he gives you the one he feels is right. But he never tells you that. He takes time because he’s made twenty-five different tunes—all of which he is not satisfied with. And he gives you the one tune he thinks is good, without letting you know how much he’s worked on it. So you feel he’s taken a long time.’
When it comes to the work front, one of the people who know AR best is Jerry Silvester Vincent, one of Rahman’s programmers and an orchestrator. Jerry was formerly a student of AR’s KM Conservatory, but is now also a composer in his own right. He is part of KM’s Qutub-E-Kripa, an ensemble of young musicians within the school that composes for the movies. Jerry and several other QK members were shortlisted for a nomination at the 2018 Academy Awards, in the Best Original Song category, for their work on Raj Thiruselvan’s family drama Lake of Fire.
Three songs—‘Have You Ever Wondered’, ‘I’ll Be Gone’ and ‘We’ll Party All Night’—were on the list.
Jerry has some pretty fascinating insights to share about Rahman’s working style.
‘It’s interesting how he always meets the directors’ expectations,’ he says. ‘He always gives them more than they expect. Not just in terms of music. Directors almost always go away feeling like they’ve got something more when they leave him. Imtiaz Ali, for example; he and Sir talk about spirituality, life, philosophy a lot. Spending time with Sir is very rejuvenating. He has that ability. He’s really a director’s composer.’
‘I will not consider myself spiritual, but I consider Rahman sir spiritual,’ says Imtiaz Ali. ‘We just sit and talk about all kinds of things.’ He adds with a laugh, ‘Sometimes very immature things even!’
AR will start focusing more and more on a film’s music the closer it gets to the release date of the soundtrack and the movie. When he starts, he’ll compose a little bit of the song and then come back after a while to look at it afresh and see how it’s sounding. He’ll correct the mistakes, improve it. Look at it objectively. He’ll keep working on it, then leaving it in between to work on something else, and revisiting it.
The last twenty days before the release though, he’ll sleep maybe one hour every day because he’ll be poring over it.
‘The last two weeks before a release are crazy, generally,’ says Jerry. ‘There’s a lot of work we do then because Sir tends to work more intensely on things closer to the deadlines. Work on [Anand L. Rai’s] Raanjhanaa in 2013 went pretty smoothly, but [Vikram Kumar’s] 24 in 2016, for example, was a nightmare . . .’
Getting songs ready for a film is only 50 per cent of a composer’s job. After the film and its songs are shot, there is the process of rerecording for it. Not only can creating the background score for a movie take its own time—especially when a director says he wants only AR to score for a particular scene, pushes for more and better—there is also the issue of Rahman himself deciding that a song will have to be reworked so as to suit the way a film-maker has shot or used it in his film. This is why, on occasion, the version of the song you see in the movie, ultimately, is different from what you heard on the soundtrack album.
‘He understands each director’s needs very well,’ says Jerry, ‘but he’ll also take his own calls sometimes and do his own thing. [Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2016 historical epic] Mohenjo Daro, for example, had only three songs originally and he suddenly decided to make it nine. Sometimes the directors reject Sir’s ideas, but sometimes they like them and they’ll fit them into the movie.’
When he is working on a song, AR will obsess over every single note and second of the piece. He’ll slave over the intro, how the song finally goes out. There is no detail that is deemed too small. And he does it even though he knows full well that some radio station playing the track is all too likely to cut out the first and last few seconds. But that doesn’t matter to him one whit. It doesn’t matter to him if no one else even realizes the kind of work he’s put into a number. What matters is that he knows that every bit of his song is perfect.
AR’s view on the matter is simple: ‘You have to do the very best you can in everything you do. You can’t become careless at one point and think it doesn’t matter if you do half-hearted work or that no one will catch you for it. They may not, but that’s not the point. You know you didn’t do your best there. And that carelessness will seep into everything you do if you aren’t mindful of it.’
The songs for Roja were released as an album in 1992. It became clear within hours of the publication that this was something else. Within days, the songs from the film—‘Chinna Chinna Aasai’ in particular—were playing everywhere. They were playing on the radio, from loudspeakers on the road and from little transistors in tea shops. The music was just so fresh.
AR had been worried before the release of the album about the appeal of his music. His sound was very different from anything Indian audiences had heard before, a radical departure from the kind of music that was prevalent—and loved. He wasn’t at all sure if people were going to take to his work.
‘In the fifteen days before Roja released, he didn’t sleep at all,’ remembers Raihanah. ‘He had these dark shadows under his eyes. But he didn’t care. He just wanted his music to be the best it could be.’
‘It was a huge shift,’ Mani Ratnam says. ‘It was a huge move away from the music of the time. There were composers other than Ilayaraja who cropped up through the 1980s and in the early 1990s, but they were all emulating Raja—whether they cared to admit it or not. They might do one good album or two good albums, but they were clearly influenced by Raja.’
Rahman was different though. He was very clear in his head that he didn’t want to go down Raja’s route. Not because he thought it was bad, but because he wanted his own sound. He grew up with influences from the West. He grew up listening to what the artists in the UK and the US were putting out. His sound was born from these. It was a very Western pop sound with classical Indian influences—both Carnatic and Hindustani.
‘Nothing like that had been heard before,’ says Mani Ratnam. ‘Not anywhere in this country. And it worked not only in southern India, but in the north as well. Everyone could take to AR’s music.’
Then came the film itself.
Roja was released on 15 August 1992—the day that marked India’s forty-fifth year of independence from British rule. Fitting, one might suppose. As it turned out, the day would mark the birth of a new Indian commercial musical culture that would reverberate throughout the length and breadth of the entire country.
