Replay: 'Kal Ho Naa Ho' And The Nine-Minute Tune That Carried An Album

Karan Johar needed new composers in 2002. He had split from Jatin-Lalit after Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and Nikkhil Advani's debut, a weepie about an Indian family living abroad, called for music that could pass for international without forgetting where it came from. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy took the job and decamped to a hotel in Pune with Advani and Javed Akhtar, who wrote every lyric.

Sony Music India put the album in shops on 27 September 2003. It sold more than 2.3 million copies. The trio won their first National Award for music direction, and Sonu Nigam took Best Male Playback Singer for the title song.

'Kal Ho Naa Ho'

The story goes that Advani was humming "My Heart Will Go On" in a Pune bakery when he asked Loy Mendonsa for something in that spirit. Mendonsa sang a tune into his phone, and the three of them finished it in about nine minutes, with Shankar Mahadevan arranging and slipping in a passage that tips its hat to R. D. Burman. Akhtar fretted that so plain a melody needed equally plain words. He was right, and he wrote stanzas that shift meaning as Shah Rukh Khan's character moves through the story. Johar held the recording until Nigam was free. Nigam then asked to redo it more simply, and that restraint is the whole trick. Nigam never pleads, and the listener ends up doing the crying. The strings swell a shade more than they need to in the last stretch, very much the 2003 idea of a big finish, but the vocal stays level and the song survives its own arrangement. It is still the song people put on when someone moves abroad, or when a friend's last night in town turns quiet, and it has never quite shaken the hospital corridor it soundtracks in the film. In 2015 the German Embassy in India made an eight-minute video around it.

'Maahi Ve'

This is the house Dharma wedding number, choreographed by Farah Khan, with Kajol and Rani Mukerji dropping by. Five voices pass it around: Udit Narayan, Sonu Nigam, Shankar Mahadevan, Sujata Bhattacharya and Sadhana Sargam. The moment to wait for is Sargam's brief "chanda meri chanda" for Jaya Bachchan's character, a soft lullaby aside in a crowded courtyard of a song. Two decades later it lives where it was always headed, on sangeet playlists, played for aunties who know every step. At six minutes it is generous with its verses, the way wedding songs are meant to be, and nobody dancing to it has ever complained.

'Pretty Woman'

Johar did something rare for a Hindi film in 2003 and got permission to rework Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman". Mahadevan kept the hook and little else, rebuilding it as a bhangra stomp and singing it with Ravi Khote. Ehsaan Noorani has said Orbison's widow told them it was the first version she had truly loved. It's the album's broadest grin, and the English asides now carry the faint period charm of a 2003 multiplex, and it still fills a dance floor faster than anything else on the record.

'Kuch To Hua Hai'

Alka Yagnik and Shaan get the quietest song on the record, and a joke comes with it. Akhtar had refused Kuch Kuch Hota Hai because of its title, and Mendonsa later said this was Akhtar paying back "a couple of 'kuch's". Yagnik's light, smiling delivery carries it, and Shaan sounds happy to play straight man. Loy's guitar keeps the whole thing airy, closer to a conversation than a confession. It's the least showy song here and, for that reason, the one that has worn best on repeat. It gets less attention than its siblings, and it's the one I'd send a newcomer to first.

(Source: official soundtrack credits, Sony Music India release)