MUMBAI: Now that The MTV Unplugged shoots have begun in full swing, every week the Pandora’s Box opens and comes out a surprise performance of an artiste’s performance. After Vishal Dadlani’s electro-rock band, the next on the list was the Bangalore-based band, Raghu Dixit Project.

Speaking about his experience with Unplugged, Raghu said excitably, “Fantastic! Not a ‘childhood dream’ but, I saw MTV Unplugged versions of Eric Clapton and Nirvana, my earliest memories of Unplugged were of these legends. And then getting an opportunity to do something like this in India was a dream come true. And the best part was that MTV allowed our fans to come and be part of the gig which was the icing on the cake.”

But the band did not collaborate with any other artiste since they wished to rediscover their own songs by breaking and rebuilding them. “We are already a collaborative band thus we built our new song by giving it a new arrangement. That itself was quite a task so we did not really involve any collaborations on particular project,” opined Raghu.

Fans can expect to hear the gold old Hey Bhagwan, Mysore Se Aayi, and Gudugudiya, with much more than a twist. It was a pleasant surprise for the fans as the band played three songs from the new album which was to be released this weekend at the Bacardi Nh7 Weekender Pune, but has now been postponed to November.

But one does get curious. With the kind of music they make, what would an Unplugged version of a half-acoustic band sound like? “We are almost half-unplugged band and the sound itself is acoustic except for the lead guitarist who plays electric guitar and the bassist who uses an electric bass guitar. But we took this opportunity to do away with the arrangement of the song itself, the way people know it, and come up with a completely different arrangement of instruments to the sound of the song to the way I sing it, that also changed. It was like rediscovering our songs again in a new form,” he explained.

Furthermore, he also spoke about how difficult it was to break down his songs and rebuild them, given the number of times they have been played. “People hate change (laughs). It was definitely difficult for me to get out of the comfort zone and do something radically different to a song that has already been played thousands of times over the years. I know that I have been playing Hey Bhagwan since 2003! So for me to break that down and rebuild it into a completely new song was definitely a difficult process but at the same time was also very exciting. Thanks to my band members, actually, because they were the ones who really worked hard on it and I just had to lay my vocals on top of that. So I think we really worked together as a band to make it sound the way it did.”

You can be sure to see some very interesting solos in the episode. “Parth, our new band-member and flautists has some very interesting solos. I say new because it has only been a year and a half since he joined us. All the songs previously had a violin and then to replace those parts with his flute playing with completely new and different solos. Bryden, who has always been playing the electric guitar played banjo and ukulele. And our new violinist, Adarsh Ramkumnar, who joined our band a few weeks before this show played his first gig at the Bacardi Nh7 Weekender Pre-party in September. So after just a three gigs when he was put onto Unplugged, he was completely over-awed by the situation. Of course, the new songs were played the way they are, with just more acoustic sounds to it.”

When asked about the album and the reason for the delay in the release, Raghu replied, “Why? Because all good things take time (laughs). We are still finalizing the mixes. Everyone is involved in it and everyone’s opinions matter. It is important not to listen to albums for a few months and then get back to it to hear new things in it and discover some of the things we would like to change. That is why we took three years to finish the album. It is not because it takes that long but because we allowed it to organically grow and take its own time to finalise.”

Finally, Raghu felt that this MTV Unplugged episode would be good opportunity for the band to market their new album, which will be out around the same time this episode is aired.