MUMBAI: Close to the heels of successfully composing a complex 15 minute piece of sheet music for the world-renowned Symphonic Wind Ensemble, a woodwind orchestra, Bollywood music director Shamir’s latest project has been to compose a special song titled ‘Lafz’ for the movie Inkaar by Sudhir Mishra.

A completely acoustic song, Lafz was first recorded in English by the stunning and talented singer Monica Dongre, while Shaan has also created a lounge version of the song. The Hindi version of the song is sung by singer Papon, who is lauded with being one of the most unique and soulful voices in the industry and Shahid Mallya who is known for singing ‘Rabba Main Toh’ from the movie Mausam.

Papon who his known for his beautifully deep voice has sung in an unusually low octave while Shahid carries the tune in a much higher range creating a sharp contrast in the sound of the track. Speaking about his role in composing the song, Shamir Tandon said, “Working with a sensitive director like Sudhir has always been a dream, - and here I got the opportunity to experiment, in fact the song was created over a casual cup of coffee. It’s a wonderful song and I think that the way in which we merged the low octave of Papon and high octave of Shahid has produced a really interesting result.”

Inkaar is a film starring Arjun Rampal and Chitrangadha, with Shantanu Moitra as music director. While Sudhir has always had a knack for writing, it came as a surprise to those working in the film that he had quite a talent at song-writing as he wrote the lyrics for English version of the song. Oftentimes guest composers are invited to add a little musical zing to a movie like Amit Trivedi did with Iktara and Lalit Pandit with Munni Badnaam. Shamir’s role as guest composer has received a great response and his composition has been chosen as the theme song for the film. Sameerji has written exceptionally profound Hindi lyrics for the song. Interestingly, the word ‘Lafz’ recurs over 24 times in the song.

Talking about the addition of the song, Sudhir Mishra added, “Shameer just captures the idea that I had about the film…it’s a strong, exciting, hard film going on in the surface but underneath it there’s a soft emotion. He’s got that out beautifully, the underneath emotion. Also the structure of the song is excellent. It totally captivates you.”

Shamir Tandon is well-known among the music industry for his work in several Bollywood films including award winning film, Page-3, Corporate and Traffic Signal. He has under his belt the credit of scoring music for 2 national award winning Indian films, more than a dozen commercially successful feature films and over a 50 advertising films in a very short span.  He is also known for his collaborative efforts with artists from round the globe like Enrique Iglesias, the boy band - Blue, Robbie Williams and Australian cricketer, Bret Lee.