Music dipped in emotions

Like every night-bird, musician Rehan Dalal loves to create in the wee hours. His latest EP This Too Shall Pass holds a great promise for his future

People cry and shut themselves down. They stop eating and sleeping. Well, one may consider all this as classic signs of a very bad breakup. But then some people do this out of habit — sit and write songs quite late into the night. And Rehan Dalal is one such guy.

He locks himself inside a room, picks up his guitar and plays a song that he wrote himself called After You. It somewhat goes like this: ‘You see I’m still getting used to life/After you, you, you’. Putting his deep emotions in the songs is a stressbuster for him, he reveals. Thus, he tells a different story every night and four such stories were compiled into tuneful compositions and put out as an album titled This Too Shall Pass. Lending music to his words, Rehan not only strummed his guitar but also added his voice to the scores. However, he borrowed the lyrics for the fifth track — Red Red Bird — from his friend Noah Zacharin and sang it himself.

These songs were made in a Toronto room, where Rehan once moved in with a guitar in his hand, because that’s what he thought people did when they went to the university. “Simply play the guitar and impress the girls,” he giggles. “But nobody was impressed except me...I don’t know if even I was,” he jokes, from somewhere in Bengaluru where he has come for a vacation.

It is from Bengaluru he believes he got his first guitar, one that his aunt had brought him to Mumbai. That’s where Rehan lived as a young boy, in a house near Churchgate, where he played his baby grand piano at a tender age of eight and listened to the jazz records of his dad. There he was gradually influenced by the music of Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, The Temptations and hip hop. He searched on the Internet for more and somewhere along, he fell in love with Soul Music. One day, he played for a show and sensed a trigger. “I think I realised that I could do this,” he recounts and ever since, the musician Rehan Dalal was born.

His first album came in 2013 by the name, Got To Feel It and Rehan became quite well-known for his songwriting skills. In This Too Shall Pass, he writes a song called Apples & Cinnamons about his feelings of getting older and losing control of what’s happening in his life. “I wrote that shortly after my grandparents passed away, back to back, and we lost a whole generation.” Walk With Me is a song he wrote for a girl asking her to come back and walk with him, when he realised he wasn’t ready for their breakup. “She came, and we were together for two years, but then life stepped in and decided that I have to go one way and she has to go another,” says the emotional musician. There’s one more called Love Just Wasn’t Enough when he had to walk away “from a love that was great”.