Replay: 'Ludo' And The Lockdown Album Pritam Wrote From His Kolkata Home

Ludo was Pritam's fifth film with Anurag Basu, after Gangster, Life in a... Metro, Barfi! and Jagga Jasoos. Both men have called it the hardest of the lot. The film knots four stories together, and every song had to land at an exact point without slowing the plot. Pritam wrote it all at home in Kolkata during the 2020 lockdown. He has said one song took him four days instead of the usual one.

T-Series released the album on 28 October 2020, ahead of the film's streaming premiere. It has seven tracks, four originals and three alternate versions, with four different lyricists. It won Pritam the Filmfare Award for Best Music Director in March 2021.

'Aabaad Barbaad'

Arijit Singh sings Sandeep Shrivastava's lyric over the Aditya Roy Kapur and Sanya Malhotra story, and it's the album's heavyweight. Pritam lays sarangi phrases over a breezy pop melody, the sort of tune he turned out by the dozen in the late 2000s and had largely set aside, and the throwback feels deliberate. It was the most-streamed song of 2020 on Apple Music, which felt right for a year when most of us were listening alone at home. Back in 2020 fans online were describing it as their song of the year and admitting to having it on loop, which tracks. The hook is so instantly familiar that a few listeners swore they had heard it somewhere before, and in a sense they had: it is Pritam quoting his own golden period, and doing it better than most of his imitators managed at the time.

'Hardum Humdum'

Pritam had played this tune to Basu years earlier, intending it for a Metro sequel that never happened. Sayeed Quadri's wordplay ("hardum har pal har shab humdum") gives Singh something to roll around his mouth, and the arrangement is a lovely mix of electronics and Hindustani colour: Roopak Naigaonkar's sarod, Feroz Shah's harmonium and a sitar line that listeners still single out. In the film it's the montage that ties three of the stories together, and the film version stretches to about four minutes with guitars and synth taking over. The main version, at three minutes, ends just as it gets comfortable, which is either a flaw or the reason people keep pressing replay. It is the song on the album most likely to win over someone who thinks they don't like Pritam. Basu cuts to it like a man who knows he has a good tune and wants everyone in the cinema to hear it.

'Hardum Humdum' (Female)

This is the rare alternate take that earns its place. Shilpa Rao sings it with extra lines from Shloke Lal, the harmonium stepping in for sarod and sitar, and her cool, slightly sleepy phrasing turns the song from yearning into something more knowing. Few people seem to know it exists. It's worth seeking out, ideally late, with the volume low.

'Dil Julaha'

Darshan Raval sings Swanand Kirkire's lyric, which builds an extended metaphor of love as weaving (a julaha is a weaver). The tune is folksy and light on its feet, coloured by instruments from the North East. It's also the album's forgotten track, rarely mentioned when the soundtrack comes up. That says more about how the album was promoted than about the song. Kirkire stretches the weaving image about as far as it will go, and a stanza or two later the thread is showing, but Raval sings it with such easy warmth that you stop counting the knots. Elsewhere on the record, Jubin Nautiyal and Ash King's 'Meri Tum Ho' does a similar job for the Abhishek Bachchan story, sugar and woodwind and all.

(Source: official soundtrack credits, T-Series release, Apple Music)