Sahana Naresh & Nirmit Shah’s latest single Vaari Vaari has elements of Hindustani music with a trippy vibe

A lot of artistes, in the recent past, have tried to merge hindustani music with other forms of music such as pop, rock and jazz. One such recent work is by musicians Sahana Naresh and Nirmit Shah. They released their latest single, Vaari Vaari, which has now crossed over 13K views on YouTube. We catch up with Sahana and Nirmit to know more about the collaboration, their future projects and more…

What was the idea behind the song Vaari Vaari?
Sahana Naresh: I had this sort of seed of an idea of wanting to do something with a classical hindustani bandish. And I was chatting with a common friend of ours, Nirmit and mine, saying, ‘hey, do you know any producer who might be interested in working with me? I am trying to do something different with a hindustani bandish.’ So, he played some of Nirmit‘s works for me and I really enjoyed what I heard. I really liked his style and aesthetic. I just randomly took a chance and I reached out to him. I sent him a voice note of this bandish, just recorded on my phone, and I guess it was my lucky day because he was like, ‘yeah, totally, let us do something.’ We hit it off and started chatting on Zoom, mainly, because I was in Bengaluru and he was in Mumbai. We did all the collaboration online, essentially.

How long did it take for you to finish the song?
Sahana: It went on for a while. Because we were both traveling and we had other commitments. And so, we started chatting last year, I think. But it took us several months to get to a point where we actually had a real song.
Nirmit Shah: Honestly, I do not feel like it took that much time. I feel like we were just doing so many things in between. If we just condense the amount of actual time, we both put it together, I would say about a week or week and a half of actual studio time.

Tell us about your future projects.
Sahana: I have a whole list of voice notes sitting in my phone. Usually, when I work on a single, I put a lot of heart and soul into it and then the whole marketing aspect is another huge bout of energy. So, I usually take a little break after that. But, I am looking forward to working on a lot of cool music and hopefully Nirmit still wants to work with me. So, maybe we’ll work on some other stuff together. But I have some ideas in the pipeline which I’m sort of fine tuning still.
Nirmit: Sahana has outtalked me, so now I am going to compete and outtalk Sahana (laughs). There are a few nice collaborations also in the pipeline for me. Some at the mixing stage, some at the production stage, some at the god-knows-what-is-happening-stage-butwe-are-going-to-make-it-happen stage, but it is all positive and a lot of work is being done. There is this interesting collaboration that I’m working on. He is not a singer; he is an entrepreneur whose side passion is singing and writing songs. He has written an incredibly simple yet very direct and touching song about facing your fears. That is all I can say about it right now.

Vaari Vaari is streaming on all major music platforms. 

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