“There’s a time for everything. You can’t force things to happen, certainly not when it’s a creative process,” Farhan Akhtar says, when we begin talking about his independent music album Echoes , which will be unveiled on April 12. His acting and playback singing debut happened in 2008 with Rock On! If it took 11 years for him to have an independent music album, he explains, “An artist needs to be at a point where he or she feels that the work can be shared with the world. To me, this felt like the right time for Echoes .”
Emotional connect
The Echoes album title comes with a line ‘For all those who keep their pain inside, scream and let the Echoes heal you.’ The album has 11 singles, all penned by Farhan and produced by Grammy-winner Tommaso Colliva. The songs were recorded in Milan and Farhan harks back to the conversations between him and Tommaso at that point: “I wanted an acoustic feel to the album. Instead of going into the nitty gritties of what instruments we can use for each song, Tommaso would ask me about why I wrote a song and what I felt while doing so. He wanted to understand the psychological and emotional story of each song. Then, he created the mood and ambience to fit the songs; this approach to music blew me away.”
Among the 11 singles, the oldest is Seagull , which stemmed from a poem Farhan had written 25 years ago. A relationship has ended and Seagull remembers the brighter side, of moments worth cherishing. “When I began working on Echoes in 2015, this poem kept coming back to me. I wanted to put music to this poem and see how it would turn out,” says Farhan.
A bulk of the writing for Echoes happened in the last four years, and some of them included revisiting older poems. A case in point is the moving ‘Why couldn’t it be me? ’ Farhan penned this poem in the aftermath of Taliban men gunning down 150 people in a Peshawar school in 2014. He came across an article about a young boy who had pretended to be sick and skipped school, while his older brother had gone to school and was killed in the massacre. Farhan had shared the poem on social media back then. “Something changed within me when I learnt about the boy’s story. Violence results in terrible waste of life and humanity,” he rues.
Music to match lyrics
Farhan mentions that Tommaso’s approach towards Echoes was to make its lyrics stand out. “He felt it’s a songwriter’s album and the designed the music to support the lyrics,” he says. One of the songs, ‘ Be all you can be’ , seems like an extension of his campaign MARD (Men Against Rape and Discrimination). He agrees and adds that it’s also a song he wrote for his daughters and other young women, goading them to be free and fearless: “We live in an age where, probably because of social media and other reasons, we constantly seek validation. I wanted to tell them to stay strong and believe in their ideas and opinions.”
As Farhan talks about the album, I am reminded of a conversation with the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy trio, during which Shankar had commended Farhan for his musical prowess and had stated that composing is easier when a director is clued into music. Reminiscing his early collaboration with the trio, Farhan says, “The driving force of music for Dil Chahta Hai were Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy, while the driving force of its lyrics was my father (Javed Akhtar). I had to ensure that the music progressed in a manner that helped the narrative. But I must state that the most enjoyable process in filmmaking, for me, is when I am at the recording studio, collaborating and watching music happen.”
Finally, what does Farhan have to say about parodies on the web and the radio where his voice and style of singing get parodied? “Imitation is the best form of flattery,” he laughs.
Before winding up, he shares that Echoes will not be a one-off album; there will be more: “Not immediately though, since I have my hands full with film projects. There’s a lot of material and I’m 100% sure I will return to the recording studio with these songs.”
