Jonita Gandhi shares story behind song credit from ‘Highway’ which she didn’t record

Jonita recently spoke with IANS and shared a “very different kind of experience” while working on music with Rahman.

Mumbai: If you’re a singer and work with the Oscar and Grammy-winning music composer A R Rahman, you don’t know what it would lead to. Playback singer Jonita Gandhi has corroborated this. The singer once did a rehearsal for an A R Rahman song before giving the take, and the raw humming became a song in itself.

Jonita recently spoke with IANS and shared a “very different kind of experience” while working on music with Rahman.

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Speaking with IANS, the singer said, “There have been some songs I’ve worked on with him where it was already sung by a scratch singer, and so all I had to do was come and sing it in my own way. So that’s the most linear way I’ve ever experienced, but also when it comes to creating the song and the songs where I’ve been present for the creation process, it’s very random. I remember when in ‘Highway’, I had sung the song, ‘Kahan Hoon Main’, and when the album was released, I came to know that there was another song that had my credit on it, and I hadn’t sung that song”.

Confused, the singer called up Rahman’s team to understand if she had been wrongly credited for the song, or if there was some communication error.

She further mentioned, “So I remember I asked his team, I’m like, ‘Hey, there’s one more song on the track list, and it says, ‘Implosive Silence’, and the singer is Jonita Gandhi, and I’m like, that’s me, but I’ve not sung this song. I’ve only sung ‘Kahan Hoon Main’’. And then I find out he used my takes from ‘Kahan Hoon Main’, of parts where I was still learning the melody”.

“I was just learning the tune at that point, and he made a whole new song out of it, which was crazy, because again, it’s just one of those spur of the moment creative, I guess, moments of inspiration for him, where he’ll think of something and then he can turn a song that was going in one direction and completely change the direction and take it somewhere else only”, she added.