DIL Chahta Hai Soundtrack

The soundtrack to the film Dil Chahta Hai (2001) was arguably the first hit soundtrack in Bollywood created by a rock band. Through interviews and analysis of the soundtrack, this book provides insights into the relationships between Bollywood films, their songs, and new production practices at a key moment of Indian popular music history.

Music scholar Jayson Beaster-Jones illustrates how the collaborative approach for this Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy soundtrack generated momentum for a new kind of Indian film song. He highlights the changing tastes of India’s urban youth audiences in the twenty-first century and shows how Dil Chahta Hai paved the way for the rock and EDM-oriented compositions of Hindi-language cinema that came to dominate the first decades of the 21st century, making Dil Chahta Hai among the most influential soundtracks in Indian cinematic history.

In his discussion of this landmark album, Beaster-Jones draws from interviews with the musician-composers of this soundtrack, reviews by music and film critics, and his own close analysis of the music to trace the production and reception of the Dil Chahta Hai soundtrack in India. Placing the soundtrack in its cultural, historical, and musical contexts, he describes how the rock band aesthetic of the music director trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (i.e. Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani, Loy Mendonsa) and the lyrics of Javed Akhtar transformed both the sound and the compositional practices of Bollywood cinema in the new millennium.

Jayson Beaster-Jones is Professor of Music in the Department of Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies at the University of California, Merced, USA. He is the author of Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (2015), Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise (2016), and co-editor of Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity (2017).