Music to my ears…

My earliest memory of music was singing very wrong lyrics to a Tamil song that was played on Pepsi Ungal Choice and letting my aunt record it. This is the song, you guys can guess the wrong lyrics…

After that it was a random song here and there but I was always obsessed with singing the whole song. I realized nobody was interested in a song beyond the first stanza. Meanwhile I was still managing to memorize lyrics in the times we could watch that song. This was before any channel solely dedicated to songs were available. Not that I had that much TV privilege. It was the rare oliyum oliyum, neengal keta paadal and what not. And then I was allowed a fm radio. I think it was after suriyan fm and radio mirchi were launched. That was my golden music period. Because shortly after that my brother introduced me to the world of pirated music. He did not allow me to download anything of course. I would have happily gotten a load of virus into the computer. So he did the next best thing. He would write them onto cds and give them, which I could use on the music system or on the computer.

I call it the golden time for me because I was up to date on every single album that came out. Be it tamil or english or hindi. My lovely brother would just download it all so he could enjoy them at his college and I could show off that I knew a particular song at my school. I won that case especially with classic pop and rap songs. While most of my classmates had no clue about 50 cents or Sean Paul I was able to sing along to half of their songs. And then for tamil I relied on the wonderful FM radio. Mirchi Senthil might be famous for being a serial artist now but he will always be the guy with smooth voice who conducted that night Mirchi Gold show. A show that played only old movie songs that my parents grew up with! Music helped me cope up with a lot on the mental health side at that time. I did not even realize it was helping me, but it did. And then I went off to college.

I had learnt to download music and movies myself by that time. I owned a nice MP3 player (a zune), a phone that could store maybe 20 songs and a laptop. So my room was one of the hangout spots to most girls in my hostel floor. I still had a hard time finding someone to discuss music with. Because apart from listening to it, I knew nothing about the nuances of it or the technicalities of it. I just knew how to enjoy good music. There were these two girls in my class who could sing. Most of the free periods they would sing some nice songs. They both were my music discussion buddies. We would discuss really small things we noticed in certain songs. Like the voice modulation of Yesudas in En iniya pon nilave or the flute music in Malare of S5 or the zen feel of Khwaja mere Khwaja. These little chats I had with them made to notice things I never noticed before in certain songs. Gave me more chances to enjoy music.

Then I got along with this amazingly crazy bunch called the Chennai Bloggers Club. Now there were trained musicians in that group and people who learnt a lot about music but never learnt music itself. Just listening to their conversations was enough fun for me. The way they dissected and analysed every string in every piece of music was just new to me. I was in a happy zone. They re-introduced me to the music I had forgotten at one point of time. It was not just how the audio they spoke about. It was the lyrics, the visuals, the clothes worn by the actors in it. And the whole thing was a carnival for me to be honest. Which song came from where, which song was written by whom, which song was supposed to be written by someone, which song had fun dance movements…. (Psst… Most of those were some old Prabu movies and the songs would have been sung by Malaysia Vasudevan)
The database was immense. I even managed to have a makeshift karaoke party with them at my place.

I miss those fun discussions and debates. Where we shared and passed information not just about indian music but any kind of music.

Later when I got into camping and traveling, campfires were the best places to reveal one’s song collection. We would be camping in remote places where we would have no cellphone reception. So our most favorite songs that were specifically downloaded and saved in our mobile phones were all we had. It was almost like sharing someone’s personal secrets from their journal. I got along with tamil poetry aficionados. They would quote Bharathiyar or Na.Muthukumar or Vairamuthu or even poetu Danush at times. And this time we started going back in time with the help of cover songs and instrumental music. No trivia was shared. Just songs that were liked by someone for some reason would be sent across and we would try to understand why they liked it while we find our own unique reasons to like it. My recent and most favorite music memory would be lying down on a makeshift pier in the middle of the night while staring a full moon along with two other friends and listening to music. All three of us took turns in choosing songs and talking about what that particular version did to us. It was so serene and beautiful and we three enjoyed this song in loop after a point of time!

Yeah we are crazy like that. Now if you are reading this and wonder why I was sharing all of this here, well I was watching Alex in Wonderland for the nth time and thought maybe I should jot my thoughts down somewhere. So here I am and enjoy!!!

P. S. if anyone wants my old songs Playlist, here it is…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDeXU58nUvM1znrb3slBJ7j-8j9DRTv7j