Unnale Thaan - My Retro Song

We recently released one of my recent compositions. It is a simple attempt of a retro song titled Unnale Thaan, which is a throwback to the 1960's.

I had wanted to compose an old style song, something like 'Kannale Pesi Pesi Kollathe', 'Paattu Paadava', etc. I had composed the pallavi alone about 4 years back. Then last year, I got a chance to get the lyrics written for this song. My colleague, Chandru wrote the lyrics and then we recorded the song. Vocalists Srivatsan and Aishwarya have rendered this song beautifully. Another colleague, Edwin, has played the accordion for this song. Karthikeyan has done a great job editing this video shot by him, Srinivasan and Chandru.

Listen to the video playlist embedded below which starts with the song, followed by an interview of the team and then some behind-the-scene clips.

Original Song + Interview + Behind-the-scenes:




LYRICS:
http://www.hificss.com/lyrics/my-lyrics/10/

SONG CREDITS:
Music: Sripathy Ramesh
Lyrics: Chandrasekar Gobal
Vocals: Srivatsan Gopaladesikan, Aishwarya Venkatesan
Accordion: Edwin Gnansigamony

VIDEO CREDITS:
Cinematography: Karthi Muralidharan, Bharath Srinivasan, Chandrasekar Gobal
Editing: Karthi Muralidharan
Direction: Karthi Muralidharan, Sripathy Ramesh

All the people involved above are my colleagues.

Contrapuntal Female Lines:

I received an interesting comment on the youtube page from a musician who plays flute, recorder, etc. He commented:
"Stumbled upon this video accidentally. Very nicely done. Kudos to the musicians. The use of a real accordion was the cherry on the cake.  Also hats off to the composer for the contrapuntal entry of the female voice. Thanks for sharing this."
Nice to receive such comments from another musician. And I am glad that the contrapuntal entry of female voice was noticed. 

The song was initially conceptualized as a male solo. Adding the female vocals at the end was an afterthought. And when I added that, I wanted to add it as an overlap between the lines. Instead of following the same tune as the male lead, I changed the tune slightly while still trying to retain harmony between the male and female lines. The male lead tune (swaram) for the lines Munnale Nadaikkiren goes like:

,,R g,m P,d P,, |

And the female starts in the 2nd half of the above line. The tune of female lead goes like:

--- --- g,m P,d | M,P --- 

As you can see from the notes above, the P,dP and g,mP will be in harmony. Similarly for the next lines: d,nd and m,Pd.

Since the female line joins only mid way through the bar, singing the same lyrics will make the listener difficult to comprehend the lyrics. So I changed the order of the lyrics. The male singer sings Munnale Nadaikkiren and the female singer sings Nadaikkiren Munnale and the Nadaikkiren in both voices appear at the same time, but the notes are different. This is some thing different that I tried in this song.

Do listen to the song embedded above and share your feedback with us.

Bonus Tracks - Scratch Tune and Variations of Humming:

And as a bonus, here is the scratch tune of the pallavi (composed around 4-5 years back) and the scratch tune of charanam (composed last year). After the scratch tune, you can listen to 2 different arrangements of the opening humming.



Song Stats (as on July 12th 2014 ; 44 days since launch):

The original video has reached around 725 views on youtube so far. I had originally shared this video on my facebook wall and it was received exceptionally well with around 250 likes, 100 comments and 16 shares. I got 20 new subscribers to my youtube account once I started with the promos of this song. I also posted this song on soundcloud (also embedded below). I didn't promote/share the soundcloud link outside. But interestingly, it is steadily receiving plays on a daily basis and crossed 1000 plays today (with 23 likes and 10 reposts).



What are your views on this song? Let me know in the comments.