Shabir has been laughing at the many lockdown memes that have been doing the rounds on social media. His favourite features a music director before and during the lockdown: the joke being that it is essentially the same.
“It doesn’t make much of a difference to us musicians. We are anyway mostly inside studios trying to crack tunes,” says the Singapore-based singer-songwriter.
He has been trying to do that over the last couple of months and the result is a ‘Lockdown EP’, which will be released by the end of June. “I see the EP as a form of self-expression. I have always wanted to express myself, and used a three-thought process to conceptualise these songs.”
While ‘Ezhuvom’ seeks to be motivational, ‘Thanimai’ aspires to be an ode to couples who have been separated. ‘Korokoro’ is a wake-up call of sorts that has the singer asking questions and reflecting on the current pandemic. “There is also an English number called ‘Together’ that expresses vulnerability and hope.”
‘Ezhuvom’, which was recently released as a single, has been inspired from ‘Bella Ciao’, a motivational folk song which has its origins in the 19th Century during the Italian resistance. “It was a song that brought people together. And, I have a personal connect to it since I listen to it all the time while I’m in the gym,” he says about the music video that features several celebrities as well, “I re-interpreted the original melody by infusing elements of our very own gaana .”
The ‘Lockdown EP’ might have kept him busy in the last few weeks, but Shabir has his eyes set on cracking the Indian music industry. He has scored for a handful of Tamil films, including Sagaa and Dhilluku Dhuddu 2. “The music scene in Singapore is very different from the one in South India,” says the composer, who shuttles between Singapore and Chennai for work, “That films depend a lot on songs means that there are several opportunities for you to train yourself as a music artiste.”
Shabir’s upcoming line-up includes Tamil film Sinam starring Arun Vijay. In Telugu, he has completed Raju Gari Gadhi 3 and is working on the tunes of another project produced by Kannada director Nagashekar.
