From fusing rock and raga, power ballads, Bollywood item songs, to pop and R & B, award winning composer and producer Clinton Cerejo, has done an incredible job as music producer for India’s First Reality Musical #SingIndiaSing offering some killer tracks, in turn carving a sound that is truly his own as Verus Ferreira found out.

How did you get on board for the Sing India Sing.

I met Brian Tellis, Rahul DaCunha and Bugs Bhargava one afternoon over lunch and they narrated the script to me and I was immediately sold. I knew there would be huge scope to do something musically which was extremely interesting.

How was it composing for something you have never done before?

Yeah I’ve done my fair share of Bollywood. But even though there are differences, there are a lot of similarities as well. In fact the narrative holds you through the entire musical pretty much like a film. And the fact that there are no dialogues, means there’s the added pressure on the music to carry the story forward. That’s one of the primary challenges we faced, which was to decide that delicate balance between narrative and musical value.

How was the songwriting process for the play?

In the initial stages it was just Rahul, Bugs and me sitting on the music at my studio. It was a very collaborative process and we would go back and forth a lot. We involved Nadir the director at a much later stage.

Sing India Sing is your most ambitious project after dabbling in Bollywood. Can you tell us something about the soundtrack and how it came out to be?

Sing India Sing is definitely one of the most ambitions projects I’ve done to date. Just under 30 songs over a year and a half. I think the beauty of this project is that on a script level itself it

demanded a multi genre soundtrack. We had to give each contestant a different and distinctive musical personality as well. That had a lot to do with why the soundtrack sounds as varied as it does. You can never be bored sonically because there’s always something different coming at you.

You said that you had to give each contestant a different and distinctive musical personality. How did you manage that?

I definitely wanted to carve out a separate musical personality for each character, but that was ordained from the very beginning at a conceptual level. Rahul and Bugs had outlined four very different characters playing the contestants and the same for the three channel owners. They demanded a different sound and needed to be distinctive. There’s a lovely dynamic vibe between the singers (contestants) Siddharth Basrur, Kamakshi Rai, Tavish Bhattacharya and Sarosh Nanavathy.

Similarly the music you composed for The Hashtags is pretty different from the rest of the score.

The hashtags again were very special characters. Conceptually so interesting, I needed to give them again a sound that was different from any of the other characters. I think it worked out well cause I went down the traditional musical route with the hashtag compositions and that set them apart nicely as compared to the other songs which are more modern and pop oriented.

So what was composed first, the music or the lyrics?

I think it’s very hard to say what came first. Usually they would have a lyrical sketch so that I had something to work with. But very often we would end up changing the lyrics completely once the music was ready. Often they would write a couple of pages and come to the studio, and there would be times I would look at those pages and pages of lyrics and just take two lines from there and ask them to rewrite the entire song around those two lines.

Brian Tellis, Suchitra Pillai and Uday Benegal play a big role in the role. How did you get into the character to write these songs?

I think Brian, Suchitra and Uday are all well defined characters in the play. For these three I decided not to be very genre specific but to go with more outlining their personalities musically. And I think their songs reflect that.

What were the difficulties you faced while working on the play?

It was mainly the sheer volume of work in terms of the back end when you consider that 29 songs is like doing four or five albums. Bouncing those many files, doing stage premixes, album versions, dubs, mixes, cue tracks, it was endless and relentless. My studio was pretty much working round the clock towards the end.

Sisters Say No coincides perfectly with the current #MeToo movement. Your comments.

I think we wrote Sisters Say No much earlier on in the play over a year ago actually. It was a song that was needed to carry the story forward and it was pretty coincidental that at the time of the release of the music in the play, the #MeToo movement was at its peak in India and the song felt extremely relevant. I fully agree that especially in a country like India, people are extremely afraid to speak up and the movement has really helped urban India in that regard.

We understand that a few songs are to be released as an album?

Yes we have shortlisted 11 songs which will be released on the Apple streaming services on the 16^th November.

What other projects are you working on at the moment?

I’m just going to be starting work on Sujoy Ghosh’s upcoming film. I’m also busy with an awesome music reality show for YouTube with AR Rahman called ARRived. It’s extremely current. I am also on the jury alongwith A R Rehman for NEXA Music for a music singing show.