The music industry has seen some striking changes in recent years. The coming of the Internet, especially, has redefined the way music, like so many other things, can be created, listened to and reached out to like-minded groups worldwide.
Vinod Varma from Kochi has been singing and making music for more than 15 years now. He has been a member of numerous bands but always found ‘selling’ his music heart-breaking. Vinod released his latest, ‘Alive,’ a single composed and sung by him on YouTube and Facebook. The hits crossed 1,000 on the very first day itself with the count increasing every day.
“Musicians are finding it easy to reach out to their audience these days. I do this regularly to a select audience, generally my friends and a few from abroad who have subscribed to my videos,” says Vinod, who released his solo album, Atma way back in the 90s. He has worked on fusion albums, sung for a couple of movies and some popular jingles.
“I still remember how, along with Nirmal Antony (drummer who plays with Stephen Devassy these days) went to Mumbai to find someone to release Atma . Most of the audio companies wanted a video of some of the songs. Those days it was expensive and we could not do it. Finally, Riyan Studio released it as an album, but only in Kerala.”
Vinod started off professionally as a guitarist in the rock band called Wrenz . One of his songs in Atma was picked as one of the best 10 songs in India by the Rock Street Journal . Another album Vinod worked for was Naadarupini , fusion music with M.G. Sreekumar. He has sung for Deepak Dev in the Malayalam film Tournament and they are also working on a Hindi album now.
Recently Vinod rendered a Telugu song for the film Telugabbai . Among the popular jingles Vinod has sung are those for Geepas, Kent Homes, and Popy Nano.
“The song ‘Alive’ was first done as a home recording. The lyrics are by Pramodh Shenoy, a Bangalore-based software engineer, and posted it on the Net. Four software professionals, Vibin Venugopal, Kiran Mathew Thomas, Anoop Kumar and Wazeem Basheer, working at Infopark happened to hear this track. They were amateur photographers with a passion for music. They asked me if they could shoot a proper video for this song. It was their first venture and I was a sort of guinea pig. They showed great dedication and sincerity, presented their shooting plans and locations, always put me in the loop. And they have done a good job.”
The shoot was completed in seven days and the rest of the editing took a couple of more weeks.
“Once the editing got over, I decided to do the song in a proper studio to get that professional feel. For this, Deepak Dev, a close friend, helped me out. I recorded the voice once again in his studio in Chennai and he added an amazing piano solo, which I think is the highlight of the song.”
The video was released online on August 7 and the response, as Vinod says, has been overwhelming ‘considering this to be a non-film song’.
