Shashaa Tirupati on 'Kaagaa Jaa Re' and Why Grief Is A Recurrent Theme In Her Compositions

There is poetry laced with tenderness in Shashaa Tirupati’s new song ‘Kaagaa Jaa Re’ but it also carries grief — of a lover’s longing. This isn’t the first time Shashaa’s work has been centred around grief. Art is self-explanatory and reflects one’s inner feelings, says Shashaa on a call from Canada. “While I am doing playback singing, it is only my voice that goes into it or it’s about how I interpret another individual’s lyrics and composition through my voice. When I write and make music, I can be myself. The art I make then becomes a representation of how I feel.”

Like her other compositions, Kaagaa Ja Re is also very minimalist in its approach. “We mainly used Sarangi and gave it an electronic folk touch. The brief that I gave to my producer Vinayak (Vinayak Shukla) was to let the composition shine and he did exactly that by arranging it in a way that compliments it.” Crediting the singers – Shakthishree Gopalan and Abhay Jodhpurkar – for treating the composition with a lot of class and dignity, Shashaa recalls that she had initially conceived the song as a female duet. “But after Shakthi recorded her portions, the work evolved, and Abhay eventually came in. That’s the beauty of collaborations. You start in one direction and the moment others get involved, the composition organically evolves, and so does the final product.” She further mentions that the post-pandemic phase has been a spring for Indie artists to prosper through collaborations. 

It wasn’t easy for Shashaa to set up a team from scratch for the video production of the song, residing in Canada. “I was far away from all the people that I used to work with in India. So, I had to put up a team here in Vancouver and get the DOP to fly from Goa to Bombay to shoot Abhay’s portion.” However, releasing her independent work in an audio-visual format was quite important for Shashaa. “We consume everything in audio-visual format today. Even for streaming platforms like Spotify, you require a visual representation of the song. That said, our idea wasn’t to make an extravagant music video. We wanted to be honest to the vision of the song, with available resources.”

The National Film Award-winning singer, who has collaborated with AR Rahman for many chartbusters, says the musician inspired her to break the norms and find magic in the minute details. “Rahman sir’s music has been like pollen. We cannot praise the extent of pollination his music has created – there is a component of his music in the work of musicians in every corner of the world. Having spent so much time with him in his studio, I’ve learnt from him to find beauty in the most mundane sound and make something amazing out of it.”