BENGALURU: You can always expect something unexpected from Shalmali Kholgade. Her latest song, Tu Hai, about falling in love, is bound to take you back to your first love. “I had a half-baked melody written on the guitar with just Tu Hai as the hook.
I knew I wanted to work with Nikhil D’Souza on something and it felt like this was that opportunity. I sent him the song in the state it was in, and he liked it enough to meet and finish it together,” says Kholgade, adding that they met over coffee, and ended up composing the rest of the song.
Before that, she had released Follow, which was a collaboration with Bengaluru-based indie artiste Bhumika Anantharaman. The song is a mix of Tamil, Marathi, and English, with Afrobeats, making it a peppy number. “I wrote to Bhumika on Instagram after hearing her collaboration with [American singer] Lisa Mishra on their track Aadat.
When we met, we ended up discussing our love for Afrobeats and Amapiano. That’s when Bhumika fished out a demo she had worked on during one of her travels to the hills. I instantly fell in love with it and wrote the melody to my Marathi verse,” recalls Kholgade, who was recently in the city for a performance.
The idea of blending Afrobeats, Marathi beats, and Kuthu, a form of Tamil folk music and dance, came very organically to Kholgade. “It was effortless and that’s why it worked. Afrobeats on Marathi lyrics is still being explored,” she adds.
The singer has been making waves in both playback and independent music. She highlights that the scene of the latter still needs to be supported, even on a global scale. “The songs and artistes that get popular are often the labels of major artistes. Independent musicians, even in the West, are self-funded,” she says.
Kholgade highlights that as an artiste in today’s day and age, it’s important to be visible. “Making music is not the problem. Putting the music out there is the tedious part. There’s a lot of music that releases every day. So to be heard in the mix, you need a thought-out strategy and enough support from your distributor. That’s what’s hard,” says Kholgade.