A.R. Rahman Says 70% Of The Ramayana Album Is Out, With Surprises Left
Nine days before Ramayana Part 1 opens, A.R. Rahman says most of its album is already out, more is coming, and the scoring took him across five cities.
A.R. Rahman has put a figure on how much of the Ramayana music listeners have already heard. "'Jai Jai Ram' is out, and almost 70 percent of the album is released," he told The Hollywood Reporter India in an interview published on Tuesday, 27 October. "We have some surprises coming up next."
He did not say what the surprises are, and T-Series, which holds the soundtrack, has not announced another release. Ramayana: Part 1 opens in cinemas on 5 November.
What is already out
The label has been releasing the music in pieces. The composers' trailer theme came out as a digital single in August. On 21 October T-Series put out a five-track soundtrack EP in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam: three Rahman songs, an orchestral "Jai Jai Ram" and the "Rama Theme", the last two credited to Rahman and Hans Zimmer. We went through that album and its language versions when it landed.
Four days later came "Mangal Rang", sung by Arijit Singh and Shreya Ghoshal, which was not on the EP. It passed 5.6 million views in nine hours on the T-Series channel.
Three cities with Zimmer
Rahman and Zimmer first met in 2009, when they had the same agent, according to the interview. Zimmer later asked Rahman to perform with his band at the 2012 Oscars. For Ramayana, the two composers worked together in three cities, Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi among them.
"There was a very friendly vibe when I went back to his studio. He was very excited that finally we were working together," Rahman said.
He has been on the film for about three and a half years. The final three months were the hardest part, he said, with scoring sessions spread over five cities, including Los Angeles, Budapest, Mumbai and Chennai. "Sometimes we slept for three hours, four hours."
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Thirteen iterations
Part of the workload, he said, came from the film's many language versions and the layers of visual effects work. "Sometimes we had to go through 13 different iterations to come back to the second or the first iteration," Rahman said. He called the process "a bit exhausting, but gratifying in the end", and said he chose to help it along "rather than become an obstruction and complaining."
He also gave a sense of the release's scale. Sony, he said, is distributing the film on more than 50,000 screens. The visual effects company DNEG is one of the co-producers, and Rahman said he had seen the first two reels: "I was blown away."
On stage next week
The interview comes days before Rahman's Wonderment tour reaches Mumbai on 1 November, with Delhi following on 21 November. He has already spoken about how the set list is changing for India, and The Hollywood Reporter India notes that music from Chhaava entered the show earlier in the tour. More soundtrack news is on our Film Music page.
Asked to describe the album in one word, Rahman picked "Epic", then added: "Really epic."
(Source: A.R. Rahman interview, The Hollywood Reporter India, 27 October 2026)
