Underneath his unassuming demeanour and easy-going attitude, throbs a heart full of stories and a mind pulsating with words. Ankur Tewari has carved a niche in Bollywood as a Hindi singer-songwriter who is ready for risks and sways to his own tune. With his two recent releases – a new EP titled Little Whale and the music of the much-awaited film Gully Boy , Tewari has waded into new musical adventures. In the capital for the prelude to the Udaipur World Music Festival (15-17 February 2019), the songster says, “The city brings out my best and worst moments!”
Intense music
A conversation over lunch with Zoya Akhtar transformed into two years of intense music-making for Gully Boy , slated for release on 14th February. With a whopping 18-song soundtrack, the film pulls together diverse musical genres with an extensive team of rappers, hip hoppers and beatboxers. “It was a challenge to meld the two worlds of hip hop and Bollywood, but it was really exciting to get our heads together to create a complex and different sound.”
The collaborative work involved multiple sessions of ideation and improvisation with Tewari penning a few songs and supervising the music for the film, “Working with young artists, rappers, hip hop musicians, was an exciting and amazing experience – these are artists and young people who are not afraid to speak the truth, they express themselves unabashedly.”
Most of the hip hop songs are rapped by Ranveer Singh for his character – Murad. “It was really exciting,” says Tewari, “it lends honesty to the character.” A few tracks have already found their way to the chartbuster lists. ‘ Apna time aayega ’, penned by Dub Sharma and Ankur Tewari “captures a powerful theme, it is something that everyone feels and dreams of.” Catchy and racy, it is quite different from the more subtle ‘ Jeene mein aaye mazaa ’. The song is written and sung by Tewari, “I wanted to explore a softer, slower feel that tells the story of our lives with tenderness.” The tracks ‘ Kab se kab tak ’ and ‘ Train Song ’ evolved as ideas between the musicians. “Some tunes grow on you, some words grow with you and at the heart of it, all songs tell a story,” says Tewari.
An affair with words
Twinning as a songwriter and singer, Tewari believes he is “essentially a storyteller.” He confesses to being an avid eavesdropper, with a passion for reading, listening and sharing ordinary stories from everyday lives of people.
His romance with words started as a child in Belgium, listening to his parents’ collection of French tapes he could not comprehend. He translated the unfamiliar sounds into words he would understand, building imaginary tales from the songs he heard. “My first attempt at storytelling was making excuses to my parents as a child about some task I had not completed or a rule I may have broken.” The innocent exercise soon became a habit and grew into a passion that brought him from Roorkee to Delhi and then to Mumbai, in an attempt to craft his own story.
Ear for acoustic
In an era when remixes and electronica ruled, Tewari developed an ear for acoustic. Never one to blindly follow the trend, he arrived in Mumbai in 2000 with a dream to record an album. Doing the rounds of music label offices, he got the greatest education of his life-rejection. “Rejections are the high points of my life. I never really had any formal training in music and each rejection inspired me to do something different, it was my schooling.” Sometimes these rejections would translate into songs, soulful stories drawn from life as it flowed.
Jannat , Tewari’s debut album was finally released a decade later, in 2010. Today, along with Sidd Coutto he has made a mark with his Hindi rock band, Ankur and the Ghalat Family known for what they best describe as Urdu and Hindi easy acoustic ballads with a mix of folk and rock, the songster has come a full circle with Little Whale being his first electronica album with collaborators Gaurav Raina and Karsh Kale. “What brings all of us together is our ear for music and our amazing sense of humour with that talent for bad jokes!”
Sitting in a bar one day, Tewari along with television and radio personality – Roshan Abbas, decided to form Kommune arts organisation that would bring stories and poetry to people. “We were just saying to each other that there are rarely any really interesting storytelling events, and then we decided to make that happen.” What started with ten people getting together in a dance studio in Mumbai to tell each other stories, grew into a mega-event called Spoken Fest in three years with a confluence of like-minded people enabling each other in the art of storytelling. “Everyone has stories to share, and we want to bring that forward,” says Tewari, “the most exciting part was that four people who were in the audience a couple of years back were on stage this time, narrating new tales.”
The song of life
As a songwriter, Tewari is never on vacation. “I am writing songs all the time, collecting ideas, scavenging thoughts and stories, creating images, devising metaphors, putting it together in the head.”
It is a continuous process where something sparks energy and inspires images, “The only common thing about my process is that I try reaching a meditative state. I don’t question much, just submit to the flow of life and where it takes me.”
Bucking the tide and following the flow is Tewari’s approach to life. He has let his talent brew, alongside his stories. When asked what would be the title of the story of his life, he took his time and finally exclaimed, “Believe it, or not.”
