Some things in life are not planned: AR Rahman

AR Rahman on how they mixed scented candles and burning marijuana to create SuperHeavy, the band with Mick Jagger.

"At the end of 2008, a lot of dark things happened in my life. I lost my sound engineer and we had floods in Chennai. I was going through a lot of stress in my work. At that point of time, I got a call from Dave Stewart asking, ‘AR, would you be interested in collaborating with Mick and me?’ So I thought, ‘Anything to get out of here at this point,’ Some things in life aren’t planned,” says Indian music legend AR Rahman, who’s teamed up with musicians Mick Jagger, Stewart, Joss Stone and Damien Marley to form the music group, SuperHeavy.

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But even before Jagger announced the formation of the band in May this year, recordings were well underway in LA, having originally started in 2009. "The time we had in the studio was full of excitement, enjoyment, innovativeness — so different from how it generally works for me. Usually, I just lock myself in a room, make my music and only when I think it’s ready, do I show it to a second person. But here, it was a different situation altogether. In one zone, there would be beautiful smells, scented candles and a piano in an almost angelic atmosphere, and on the other side, you’d smell marijuana."

Just before India’s Independence Day, SuperHeavy released its second single Satyameva Jayate... Adds Rahman, "A long-standing dream of mine was to take one of the morals of Indian culture, which is Satyameva Jayate (truth alone triumphs) and make it into a song. I thought it would be historic if Mick, Joss, Damien, Dave and I could come together for a song like this, which is iconic in a way. When we started working on the song, I didn’t have any lyrics other than Satyameva Jayate. Later, we filled in the lyrics, and we added the choir to make it more epic."



SuperHeavy’s first album hits store shelves on September 19, and Rahman has managed to add one more song to the album with an India reference: "Apart from Satyameva Jayate… there is also a romantic number called Mahia…"

The Grammy winner is currently working on Alex Kurtzman’s Welcome to People and a DreamWorks Studio animated movie, tentatively titled Monkeys of Mumbai. His upcoming Indian projects include Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar and Rajinikanth’s Rana.