Replay: 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' And The Nine-Minute Tune That Carried An Album
Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's 2003 soundtrack for Kal Ho Naa Ho sold 2.3 million copies, and two decades on the title song still leads and a Roy Orbison rework holds up.
Karan Johar needed new composers in 2002. He had split from Jatin-Lalit after Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and Nikkhil Advani's debut, a weepie about an Indian family living abroad, called for music that could pass for international without forgetting where it came from. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy took the job and decamped to a hotel in Pune with Advani and Javed Akhtar, who wrote every lyric.
Sony Music India put the album in shops on 27 September 2003. It sold more than 2.3 million copies. The trio won their first National Award for music direction, and Sonu Nigam took Best Male Playback Singer for the title song.
The launch came two days after the album hit shops, on 29 September at the Taj Lands End in Bandra, with the cast in black and the trio playing the whole album live. At the Filmfare Awards in February 2004 it took music director, lyricist and male playback.
'Kal Ho Naa Ho'
The story goes that Advani was humming "My Heart Will Go On" in a Pune bakery when he asked Loy Mendonsa for something in that spirit. Mendonsa sang a tune into his phone, and the three of them finished it in about nine minutes, with Shankar Mahadevan arranging and slipping in a passage that tips its hat to R. D. Burman. Akhtar worried that so plain a melody needed equally plain words, and wrote stanzas that shift meaning as Shah Rukh Khan's character moves through the story. Johar held the recording until Nigam was free.
Nigam then asked to redo it more simply, and the take on the album is the plainer one. He never pleads on it, and he never raises his voice to get a line across. The strings rise in the last stretch, the 2003 idea of a big finish, and the vocal stays where it was. It is still the song people put on when someone moves abroad, or when a friend's last night in town turns quiet, and in the film it plays over a hospital corridor. In 2015 the German Embassy in India made an eight-minute video around it.
'Maahi Ve'
The Dharma wedding number, choreographed by Farah Khan, with Kajol and Rani Mukerji dropping by. Five voices pass it around: Udit Narayan, Sonu Nigam, Shankar Mahadevan, Sujata Bhattacharya and Sadhana Sargam. In the middle comes Sargam's brief "chanda meri chanda" for Jaya Bachchan's character, a lullaby aside in a crowded courtyard of a song. It runs six minutes. Two decades on, it is on sangeet playlists, played for aunties who know every step.
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'Pretty Woman'
Johar did something rare for a Hindi film in 2003 and got permission to rework Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman". Mahadevan kept the hook and little else, rebuilding it as a bhangra stomp and singing it with Ravi Khote. Ehsaan Noorani has said that Orbison's widow told them it was the first version she had truly loved. The English asides place it squarely in a 2003 multiplex. It is also the track on the album built for a dance floor.
'Kuch To Hua Hai'
Alka Yagnik and Shaan get the quietest song on the record, and a joke comes with it. Akhtar had refused Kuch Kuch Hota Hai because of its title, and Mendonsa later said this was Akhtar paying back "a couple of 'kuch's". Yagnik sings it light, with a smile in the voice, and Shaan plays it straight. Loy's guitar keeps it airy, closer to a conversation than a confession, and the tempo never hurries.
It is the least showy song on the album, and the one with the fewest stories attached. Akhtar's joke is the only one.
(Source: official soundtrack credits, Sony Music India release)
