Shilpa breathes life into her old classic
The singer has recreated her debut song ‘Tose Naina Lage’ from the movie ‘Anwar’
Bollywood singer Shilpa Rao stepped into the industry with ‘Tose Naina Lage’ from the movie ‘Anwar’. The song was appreciated by critics and audience alike, so much so that it went to become a classic. And from there on started Shilpa’s journey of singing back to back chartbusters.
To thank her fans for all the
love and appreciation, the ‘Bul
leya’ singer recreated her debut song during the lockdown, with minimum resources. Millennium Post joined her to talk about the reprised version, the difficulty in recording it at home and more. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:
Why did you decide to release the song again?
The only song that I have done with Saregama is ‘Tose Naina Lage’. It’s been 13 years and somehow the love for this song never faded. As we completed 13 years, I decided to present it in a new version for my fans. This was sort of a thank you for all the love that the listeners have shown over the decade.
Recreating a classic like this comes with a lot of responsibility and fear of disappointing the fans. Didn’t that bother you?
Honestly, both come with a different set of challenges. Recreation is difficult in terms of emu
lating classics that were sung by
legends. It’s a major challenge to be able to live up to what the masteros have done. With new compositions, you need to kind of connect with it and understand the emotion. So both of them are very different but equally challenging.
Tell us about the challenges of recording and shooting the song amid lockdown.
To be very honest, I have always recorded in the studio and there is always a recording engineer, someone to guide you and take care of everything. But over here, you had to record by yourself, be your own judge of the takes and improve it. So, yes it was not an easy job but it somehow taught me so much.
Moreover, doing a version of any song is not easy because the song is already a classic. People have heard it in a certain way so you have to keep the essence of the song and still make a new version. In this case as well, it was a little challenging but Jivitesh Kharbanda is a very good friend and an amazing musician. He helped me in every possible way. We did all the work during the lockdown. Ones I was done, Jivitesh sat down and made the whole track, Utkarsh Amarpuri mixed and mastered it. I had worked with Utkarsh on other projects previously and it was a very obvious choice to have him on board. Shooting the video was of course very challenging because we had very limited equipment. There were no DSLR cameras to capture depth in the video. I just did it all with few ideas and I am happy about the fact that it taught me so much. I learned that scarcity leads you to better ideas. Because equipment or infrastructure was limited, me and director Ritesh Krishnan could put our heads together to make this video look beyond what you could shoot at home.