Songs in Every Language

Hindi is what most of our songs come back in, and the reason is simple: it is the language people argue, joke and apologise in, so it is the language ...

Tamil punishes a careless lyric more than most languages, because the sound and the meter carry as much as the words do. So we keep the vocal in front...

Telugu songs get ordered most for weddings, birthdays and for parents, and the ones that work best name something specific: the village the family cam...

Kannada orders lean towards family: parents, grandparents, a sibling moving to another city, a housewarming. We write in everyday Kannada rather than ...

A lot of Malayalam songs we make are ordered from outside Kerala, for someone inside it, or the other way round. That distance tends to be the subject...

Bengali gives a song licence to be openly emotional in a way that other languages resist, and we use it. Orders come mostly for parents, for Poila Boi...

Marathi songs get ordered for Gudi Padwa, for weddings, for parents, and increasingly for retirements, where the song ends up being played to a whole ...

Gujarati orders cluster around weddings and Navratri, and both want energy, so those songs come back brighter and faster than most. But the quiet ones...

Punjabi carries two registers well and people use both. The loud one is for sangeets, receptions and birthdays, dhol forward, everybody on their feet....

People come to Urdu for the vocabulary, usually for love, for loss, or for an apology that needs to sound considered rather than casual. We can keep i...

Odia orders divide neatly between family occasions, birthdays, weddings, songs for parents, and devotional pieces, particularly around Rath Yatra. We ...

Assamese songs get ordered around Bihu and for family, and often by people working a long way from Assam who cannot get back for either. That distance...