Replay: 'Ludo' And The Lockdown Album Pritam Wrote From His Kolkata Home

Ludo was Pritam's fifth film with Anurag Basu, after Gangster, Life in a... Metro, Barfi! and Jagga Jasoos. Both men have called it the hardest of the lot. The film knots four stories together, and every song had to land at an exact point without slowing the plot. Pritam wrote it all at home in Kolkata during the 2020 lockdown. He has said one song took him four days instead of the usual one.

T-Series released the album on 28 October 2020, ahead of the film's streaming premiere. It has seven tracks, four originals and three alternate versions, with four different lyricists. It won Pritam the Filmfare Award for Best Music Director in March 2021.

The singles came first: "Aabaad Barbaad" on 21 October, "Hardum Humdum" on 25 October and "Meri Tum Ho" on 28 October, the same day as the rest. All seven tracks run 26 minutes 48 seconds. The Filmfare was Pritam's fifth in that category. Basu also borrowed an old song for one scene, C. Ramchandra's "Qismat Ki Hawa Kabhi Naram" from Albela (1951), sung in the film by Pankaj Tripathi's Sattu. "So I got the rights," Basu said at the time.

'Aabaad Barbaad'

Arijit Singh sings Sandeep Shrivastava's lyric over the Aditya Roy Kapur and Sanya Malhotra story. Pritam lays sarangi phrases over a breezy pop melody, the kind of tune he turned out by the dozen in the late 2000s and had mostly set aside since.

It was the most-streamed song of 2020 on Apple Music, in a year when people were listening at home. Fans online called it their song of the year. A few said the hook sounded like something they had heard before, and in a way they had. It is Pritam's late-2000s sound, brought back on purpose, in a film set very much in the present.

Her phrasing is cooler and slower than Singh's, and the yearning in the song turns into something more knowing.

'Hardum Humdum'

Pritam had played this tune to Basu years earlier, intending it for a Metro sequel that never happened. Sayeed Quadri's wordplay ("hardum har pal har shab humdum") gives Singh something to roll around his mouth, and the arrangement mixes electronics with Hindustani instruments: Roopak Naigaonkar's sarod, Feroz Shah's harmonium and a sitar line that listeners still single out. In the film it's the montage that ties three of the stories together, and the film version stretches to about four minutes with guitars and synth taking over. The album version is three minutes and stops soon after the second chorus, which is one reason, going by listener comments, people press replay. Basu gives it room in the film, cutting to it as the stories cross. That longer cut, 4:25, sits on the album as its own track.

'Hardum Humdum' (Female)

Shilpa Rao sings it with extra lines from Shloke Lal, and the harmonium takes over from the sarod and sitar. Her phrasing is cooler and slower than Singh's, and the yearning in the song turns into something more knowing. It is the least played track on the album.

'Dil Julaha'

Darshan Raval sings Swanand Kirkire's lyric, which builds an extended metaphor of love as weaving (a julaha is a weaver). The tune is folksy and light on its feet, coloured by instruments from the North East. It is rarely mentioned when the soundtrack comes up, and it was not one of the songs pushed at release. Kirkire carries the weaving image through every stanza, and Raval sings it easy and warm.

Elsewhere on the record, Jubin Nautiyal and Ash King's 'Meri Tum Ho' does a similar job for the Abhishek Bachchan story, sugar and woodwind and all. It plays over his segment's father-and-daughter thread, and an unplugged take of it, 3:33 long, is the album's third alternate version.

(Source: official soundtrack credits, T-Series release, Apple Music, T-Series singles)

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