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Leslee Lewis: I grew up with Bollywood around me, but wanted to do something different and Western
Music composer Leslee Lewis talks about why he consciously chose to dabble in western music since he began his career.
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Singer Leslee Lewis grew up with Bollywood around him, as he likes to put it, but he admits he always wanted to dabble in Western music. And recently, he came out with an English song, Entourage, in collaboration with rapper-singer Omar Gooding.
Lewis reveals that people didn’t gel well with this genre initially here back home. “Nobody got it in the 1980s when I did it here. People said, ‘English mein samajh nahi aata, do lines ke aage kya gaa rahe ho, kya bol rahe ho.’ They lost it, and that’s what was happening when I was growing up,” he recounts, adding, “I was listening to English and Hindi both. My dad (late PL Raj) was the biggest choreographer; he had done films such as Sholay (1975), Don (1978); I grew up with Helen aunty and Laxmikant-Pyarelal. I wanted to do other things. People weren’t getting Western music in 80s, so I had to simplify it.”
The 61-year-old, who has given hits such as Yaaron and albums such as Colonial Cousins, believes that people in India prefer sweetness in their music.
“Indian people need mithaas... rock, for them, is distortion, something very abrasive and they didn’t like it much. By the time I got down to Aapki Dua in my album Pal, it was a sweet rock kind of thing,” says Lewis.
Cut to Entourage, he claims that he is “probably the only Indian person” singing in Hollywood, in English right there.
“That’s been crazy with all kinds of stuff going on. A few days back, I released another song Haathon Mein Haath. In the 1990s what you used to call Indie pop, I have started my own label about that, with global music in Hindi. I released a song in June called Chhoda Tune, which really did well. It got listed on three playlists in India, Brazil and Argentina. What’s a Hindi song doing in Brazil? (laughs) It’s rock blues song, all in Hindi. Acceptance of different songs is happening,” concludes Lewis.
