Singer Deepika Seth on releasing 'Shaayad' music video: Inside the vintage visuals and debut album 'Qisse Kal Ke'

I wrote this song two years ago, when I was in a relationship with another artiste and I realised we viewed our creative practices very differently. We were fundamentally different and in hindsight, I don’t think either stance was wrong. The visuals tell an original story about an established Bollywood actress in the 70s and the director she falls in love with. We see them making a film together. She’s enamoured by him and he’s enamoured by her — but he’s also deeply invested in the film he’s making. For him, the film often becomes more important; for her, the emotion they share matters most. As the video progresses, we watch them move through conflict and work things out along the way. We wanted to make the project as historically accurate as possible, despite very limited budgets. That’s where our two collaborators came in. It gave us the perfect visual world for the album. The story ends with a bit of a climax and I’ll let you discover that by watching the video.

I wrote Ittefaq from a place of innocence. It was a new love story; there was a lot of hope, wonder and joy. Of course, that fear always creeps up: is this what I’ve been looking for all along? But that fear had not really been realised yet. I was still very much in the happy place when I was creating Ittefaq. However, Shaayad is a song that comes after you’ve lived with that love story for a bit. As the love grows deeper and richer, you also feel more scared to lose it. So, I think, the love story was quite mature by the time Shaayad had come along. So while writing Shaayad, I was acknowledging the fact that this may not last, but it hadn’t ended yet. I wanted to stay in the present moment, in the happiness and joy and live it to the best of my potential. This was part one of the album, which I call ‘The Romance.’ After this, there’s a part two which we’ve called ‘The Ruin.’

Why I picked Qisse Kal Ke is that ‘kal’ means both yesterday and tomorrow. While making this project, I kept feeling pulled between the present, past and future. In distress, the human mind tends to escape where we are: we either rush into the future or go back into the past trying to figure out what went wrong. Staying with the present moment is very hard. I think the first two songs are about fear of the future. The next two songs, part of ‘The Ruin,’ dissect the past. Ultimately, this album is about getting comfortable with ‘jo bhi hai kaafi hai’ (whatever is, is enough), which comes later in the journey in a song called Saathi, which I’m still working on. I hope everyone who listens can stay with whatever comes up in their bodies a little longer, process it and move forward. I think momentum is importan