Shalmali Kholgade on how she enjoys being an indie artiste
Since childhood, Shalmali Kholgade has loved to be on stage. She was recently in town to kickstart her This is Me tour with a bigger ensemble and open-stage performance. She took some time out to speak with us on her journey as an independent singer-songwriter-composer, and how she is now all happy and content. Excerpts:
You’re quite regular to Kolkata. How do you like the city?
I have fallen in love with the city even more now after I know many Bengalis in Mumbai who are from Kolkata. Two among them, my closest friends and my teammates, Dev Narayan Gupta, who is the director of choreography and Priya Roy, one of the key dancers, are from Kolkata. It’s always amazing to see the kind of energy and talent they bring.
What tricks are they teaching you?
(Laughs) I think they have a way of visualising things. I mean when Dev is choreographing a piece, he sees something much sooner than I see or even think, and in a way, I don’t doubt him and just let him do the way he wants to do it. I wouldn’t call it a trick, but I think it is just sheer talent. I feel so blessed that I am around people like that.
How important is it for you to have a team of dancers on stage?
I wouldn’t say a team of dancers is important for everyone. However, I feel the trend has become common today as many artistes have dancers on their show. I started this some good six years back, because I always wanted to do it. I wanted to sing and dance and put up a show. My agenda for the shows is not just giving my audience an opportunity to hear me sing, which they can anyway do through other media. So if they are seeing me live, I should bring more to them—choreography and an interactive show. My team is ready to rehearse every day, spend long hours practicing, as they would do for their own show and that’s how I wanted my team to be. That ownership, which every band member feels is so important, because that way, the show shines.
For some time now, you have been putting all your efforts into creating original music. Was it a conscious decision?
It was in my naseeb (destiny) that I had to write my music. It had always been my calling to not just be dependent on another person to write a song, to which I could lend my voice to, which is what typically happens in a film song. During Covid, there weren’t many films getting made, so it was the most appropriate situation for me to start composing and writing my songs. And it became the thing I wanted to focus on, naturally, and I started to find a lot of joy in doing that. I always felt a little incomplete when I was just singing.
Did you take a break from playback singing?
There’s no need to take a break. It’s a very different line, just like the three railway lines of Mumbai. The Central line is my original music, Western line is playback, and the harbour line, which only a few know about, would be me as a composer, composing songs for other singers.
What’s your process of writing songs?
Ideally, it’s a practice now to sit and force a song out of me regularly, since it doesn’t come automatically yet. As of now, all of the songs that I have written have been born out of emotional situations. Whenever I am feeling something strongly, I write pages on what I feel and as I write that, in the writing, you find a word that has a sonic quality, or a phrase that sounds like a line in a song. I take that line, go over to the next page, and try to build that line or that idea. While writing these, sometimes, I have found my song’s title, sometimes the entire chorus, the start of the song, or the middle of a song. With me, the creation of a song has often started with writing rather than creating the melody. And it doesn’t work out the other way round for me.
What’s in your pipeline?
Last year, This is Me was a club tour. This year, the tour, which already kickstarted with my performance in Kolkata and then at Kala Ghoda, will be for a bigger audience and a bigger ensemble, and will introduce people to who I really am. Along with that, my original compositions are also in the pipeline. I have collaborated with Coke Studio Bharat too for a song.