While ‘Pushpa: The Rise’ emerged as the surprise package of 2021, the film’s music has turned out to be the icing on the cake.
For the music director Devi Sri Prasad, better known as DSP, the movie is no less than a reunion as he teamed up with Allu Arjun and Sukumar again after ‘Arya 2’ which released in 2009.
The moment he heard the story, DSP smelt a winner in the works, he told IANS. “I got an opportunity to work on something different, in terms of songs and background score as well. Once you have the concept that’s radically different and the platform ready, I was confident that people would own it,” he explained.
The success of the songs in all the languages that the movie released in, has come as a booster for DSP. Recalling how each song was produced individually for each of the five languages – Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi – DSP said that composing the song tunes was the easy part. However, getting the vocals right for each language was not so simple, he confessed.
“As and when we’re discussing the script itself most of the songs compositions happen, like in 5 to 15 minutes I get the song tune ready, thereafter orchestration takes some time. But when it came to recording the vocals, I had to spend around a month on recording vocals for each song. I would have to brief the singers on each language expressions, and sometimes I had to change the expressions depending on the language.”
The movie background too had DSP donning his creative hat and burning the midnight oil. He credits his love for background music composition to music maestro Ilayaraja. “He showed us the power of background music in the movies” DSP states reverentially.
For the confrontation scene in the movie’s climax, DSP decided to literally use a sixth language in the background music. Apart from the sense of gravitas it lends to the scene where the protagonist and antagonist face off against each other, DSP felt Sanskrit would be universally accepted in all the regional language markets that ‘Pushpa’ was screened in.
He went the whole distance for the scene’s background music.
“I took the help of a Sanskrit pandit for the background score in the climax scene. I gave him the tune, explained the sequence and told him to compose the background lyric in Sanskrit. Everybody loved it”.
With the movie’s songs ‘Oo…’ and ‘Saami’ trending at New Year dos all over India and even abroad, DSP jokingly describes them as unofficial new year party anthems of 2022. And with ‘Pushpa 2’ expected to go on floors in around a month’s time, DSP is preparing to flourish his music wand for an encore.
“We have plans for a couple of songs for ‘Pushpa 2’. There are going to be some terrific situations in the movie. You can also expect some soulful music in the movie,” DSP says.
As for the year ahead, DSP actively plans to work on Bollywood projects. “I’ll be releasing some singles and music videos this year,” he signs off.
