A singer-songwriter, poet, award- winning lyricist, entrepreneur and now music supervisor, he has a multitude of singles and albums and EP to his name. His latest release being a six-track, lullaby record called Aaja Nindiya for one of India’s newest music label, Tiger Baby Records – which Ankur has co-founded with Bollywood power duo Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti.
The soundscapes for Akela flit from sombre to hopeful. The sounds are a collage of post-apocalyptic scapes through slides on Hawaiian steel guitar, dreamy falsetto vocals to even field recordings of birdsong and spoken word. Delving into a more melancholic and ambient sound garden, Ankur builds a kaleidoscope of love, loss, and dreams in Akela, resulting in an album – produced by Rohan Ramanna of Salvage Audio Collective – that showcases the artist that Ankur Tewari has come to be.
The 2019 film Gully Boy introduced mainstream Indian to rap and hip-hop and the film industry to music supervisors, a role that Ankur has come to wear like a well-fitted jacket. Since then, Ankur has supervised the music side of things for projects like Amazon Prime’s Made in Heaven (2019) and the 2022- released Indian romantic noir drama, Gehraaiyaan – for which he was nominated for best lyricist at the International Indian Film Academy Awards (IIFA). Ankur had won best lyricist for ‘Apna Time Aayega’ with DIVINE at the 2020 Filmfare Awards.
He dons the music supervisor role again for the much-awaited Netflix film, The Archies and an upcoming show for Amazon Prime, Bandwaale which he’s also written, show-running and co-directing. 2023 has already seen him serve as the creative architect and music supervisor on the first season of Coke Studio Bharat, that featured 50 artists collaborating and creating a 8-track soundtrack.
When not busy with making music for the movies, the co-founder of Kommune – which runs India’s largest spoken word festival called Spoken – is a member of the Hindi Samiti with the New Delhi government, which works to popularise Hindi in the region.
“Akela is pretty much a pandemic project when we were all locked away. It essentially deals with loneliness and investigates the aspects of loneliness. It is, honestly, a musical representation of what I was going through and how I felt during that period. I try and reflect my state of mind through my music. To my own shock, Akela is quite different from the work I have created before and the fact that I gravitated towards these sounds and soundscapes. Surprisingly, when the lockdown was called off and we started mingling and meeting people again, my sound – organically – drifted back to what it used to be, with some resonance of this flavour. If I had to create a song tomorrow, it wouldn’t be what I experienced during that time,” he says.
Read the full story that first appeared in Global Indian here:
Leave a Reply