‘After months and months of collating, recording, shouting, yelling, the SOLO music line-up has turned out to be a crazy mix of musicians!’, wrote Bejoy Nambiar on his Facebook page a few days ago. It is quite a splendid mix, if one looks at the names he has posted on the page — ‘Prashant Pillai, Thaikkudam Bridge, Masala Coffee, Gaurav Godkhindi, Agam, Filter Coffee, Brodha V, TaalAtma, Abhinav Bhansal, Sooraj Kurup, Sez’.
Bejoy Nambiar with Dulquer Salmaan on the sets of Solo
Bejoy’s Malayalam-Tamil project, Solo , with Dulquer Salmaan in the main role, has been drumming up a lot of excitement ever since he announced the project. Even though he prefers to keep the details about the movie under the wraps, Bejoy chose to give the bare minimum details about the music. There are 12 to 13 songs, he says.
“Music is always an integral part of my movies. There is a lot of music in the form of background music as well. In fact, when I write my movies, I work on the music as well. The soundscape is very important in my projects,” says Bejoy, who made his mark in Bollywood with Shaitan, David and Wazir .
So why did he opt for such an illustrious line-up of musicians? Bejoy smiles, saying, “Because I love their music and this is how I could work with all of them. It was an extremely satisfying experience.”
Bejoy Nambiar
The bilingual has songs in Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi and English. Among the Malayalam songs there are tracks by Thaikkudam Bridge, Masala Coffee and Sooraj Kurup. Abhinav Bhansal, who is based in Mumbai, has also done a Malayalam song. The English song is by Gaurav Godhkhindi and the band Filter Coffee has done a Hindi track, he adds.
The singers include Shashaa Tirupati (the voice behind the reboot version of Humma humma ), Govind Menon, Vijay Yesudas and Siddharth Basrur, a composer-vocalist. Bejoy adds that there are a lot of new voices too in the album.
String of stories
Meanwhile he prefers to keep mum about the storyline of Solo . “There is enough suspense surrounding the film and let it remain so (laughs). All I can say is that it is an anthology with four stories and not five. Actually I got exhausted by the time I finished the fourth one,” says Bejoy, who has written the story and screenplay of the movie shot simultaneously in Malayalam and Tamil.
Bejoy Nambiar with Dulquer Salmaan on the sets of Solo
As for the cast, Dulquer acts in all the four stories. In fact his hipster look in one of the segments leaked online and created a lot of buzz. Another highlight is an ensemble cast featuring artistes such as Nasser, Suhasini Maniratnam, Renji Panicker, Soubin Shahir, Ann Augustine, Anson Paul, Arthi Venkatesh, Shruthi Hariharan, John Vijay, Neha Sharma, and Dhansika among others. Behind the scenes are cinematographers such as Madhu Neelakandan, Girish Gangadharan and Sejal Shah.
Bejoy, who won critical acclaim with his short films before he made his first feature film, says that he didn’t plan Solo as his first film in Mollywood. “I was keen on exploring something new in Indian cinema. When I wrote it, I thought of it only as my next movie. It is just that it turned out to be my first work in Malayalam,” he says.
It has already been reported that he is planning for the Hindi remake of Mani Ratnam’s Agni Natchathiram . But Bejoy says that it has not been finalised since his focus is now entirely on Solo .
“We are working towards releasing Solo by September,” he signs off.
