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Updated June 25th, 2021 at 12:22 IST

Shashwat Sachdev on how 'Dobara' is based on 'modern love': It's an ever-evolving concept

Shashwat Sachdev talked about how he wanted to write about love for his generation. He elaborated the ideation that went behind making his single 'Dobara'.

Reported by: Alifiya Shaiwala
Shashwat Sachdev
IMAGE: SHASHWAT SACHDEV'S INSTAGRAM | Image:self
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Shashwat Sachdev, who has been learning music since he was a child, won the National Award for his background score in Aditya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike. And now, he has unveiled his first single Dobara from the album Sha. In an exclusive interview with Republic World, Shashwat elaborated how the imagery of love is different for the newer generation and shared how Dobara was made. 

Shashwat on 'modern love'

Singer-composer Shashwat, who has worked on films like Phillauri and Veere Di Wedding, shared, 

"When I say modern, it's not like only for 2021 or for say 2025. I feel that love is a philosophy. Love is an ever-evolving concept. So what love meant 300 years back, when we think of poetry related to love, we still go back to fields, we still go back to a tree and a girl sitting underneath the trees, always talk about rain or we talk about clouds. But when you talk about 2021, a lot of the audience doesn't think of love like that. It will talk about more modern concepts that are not about running in the fields or that are not about the clouds and when people talked about love like, Teri zulfe jo hai vo baadalon ki yaad dila rahi hai, that is not love anymore, that was love like 80 years back. Now, maybe the imagery of love is different for the newer generation, or the philosophy of love is different for the newer generation."

He continued, "When I was writing about love, I wanted to write about love for my generation. I wanted to write about what I feel or how I would look at falling in love or falling out of love and also, I feel that in a country like India, where the sex ratio is 1028-2000, there are 28 people that are not at all getting opportunities. So this was not the case 40-50 years back. So that’s what I mean by modern love."

Shashwat on how Dobara was made 

Shashwat asserted,

"I did this film Phillauri and when that came out, it got a lot of critical acclaim and a lot of people reached out to me for working on labels, singles, independent music. But that was my first year of being in Mumbai, I was just trying to understand what I do and how I work. And was still taking my time. And then a lot of other labels approached me. And then there was a time when I met this label owner Shivam Malhotra last year. I don’t know if lockdown had to do anything with it but basically, it was that we worked together very well. And so he had the conviction in the music I was making and so we connected. I sent him a set of songs that I've done, he really liked them and said to me that Sha, I really want to work with you. Yeah, one plus one has to be made for something like this to work out."

Shashwat on why he made an album with lo-fi influences 

"I want to explore universes that I have not heard before, or I want to hear, and I can hear it in my head because if I make a song that somebody has heard before, a song that sounds like something was done already, then I don't know. What am I? How am I contributing? As an artist, my idea is not just consuming, but also contributing to space, the creative space. And so when I started working on it, I thought that this is one phase, I've not heard lo-fi, with vocal. First of all, universally, in the lo-fi genre, if you look at lo-fi, there are very few songs that are like pop songs because it's not a pop genre, it is a very niche genre. Most of the future-based artists are kind of these younger artists that are not working with western classical music because they're primary producers and not like, composers, non-musicians."

He continued,

"When we were finalising our mixes and masters, and also then our final production, we thought that maybe we should compare our song to the other songs that sound like ours; at least so that we know if our music sounds good or not. And we actually couldn't find even a single reference that sounded like ours because it had the vocals that were not like we put on a pop album. And so that's when you're even more confident that at least we are getting an opportunity to create, other teams, getting an opportunity, to create something that we don't know. So that comes with certain baggage of not sure if it's going to be appreciated or it's going to be accepted. But also with a little bit of gratification that you've created something and not just copied it at all."

Watch Dobara here:

His camaraderie with co-singer Shreya Jain 

He remarked,

"Shreya works with me, she assisted me through the album, we were working together. The last lockdown she came over, the reason that she was singing some of the things were that she was like right there. But the second important thing about her is that she's an ‘insane Indian classical singer’. I really enjoyed working with her because of her education and her practice. There are 10 songs in the album, 8 of them were made from scratch in 8 days. Every day, we would write a song, we would produce it, we would sing it and there was no rush, there was no pressure, we were just waking up at 3-4 o'clock in the afternoon. And then we would sit down till 6-clock, and by 7.30-8 o'clock, we would finish writing the melody and then finish the song. And at 11, we would watch a film, watch films till 8-9 in the morning, then the next day we would make another song and most of the music was made like that."

 

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Published June 25th, 2021 at 12:22 IST

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