Looking at the blueness of the sky at four in the afternoon, absorbing the golden hour he knew would fade before long, Taba Chake realised that just by standing on his balcony, he could write songs about many different emotions. It did not have to be about one thing. That, he tells us, is the difference between writing songs for yourself and writing for a film that needs a certain emotion.
Taba is in Arunachal Pradesh as we talk – his home state that has just pronounced him an ambassador for its art and culture. Factors like having sung and written songs in the Arunachalese tribal language of Nyishi must have brought forth the honour, Taba agrees. “Nyishi comes under the Tani clan, to which I belong. I speak the language at home, and growing up listening to music of different languages and genres, I wondered why nobody was writing songs in our native language. It is after I released them that I learned I was the first person to do so,” Taba says, admitting that he was more than a little proud about it.
‘Ngo akin’, a Nyishi language song, featured in his very first EP (Extended Play – a shorter musical release that contains four to six tracks) called Bond with Nature, released in 2016. But Taba did not sing only in Nyishi, he speaks and writes songs in Hindi, English, Nyishi and even Mongolian. In Bombay Dreams, his first full fledged album of 2019, there is a love song in Nyishi (‘No Doma Lo’), a dreamy romance in English (‘Walk with Me’), a meditative Hindi track (‘Shaayad’), and even a Mongolian number (‘Hugulo’).
“Lyrics are the first step in my songwriting, mostly. Then comes the melody. Rarely, there would be songs like ‘In waadiyon mein’ (from Bombay Dreams) - for which the melody came first and the lyrics later on. But for songs like ‘Shaayad’, ‘Meri Dastaan’ (both from Bombay Dreams), it was the lyrics. I do not want to make a happy melody with sad lyrics, but a melody of the emotion in the lyrics,” Taba says.
It is important to him that he writes and composes his songs. He plays his guitar in the finger plucking style that he used when he first picked it up as a child, and he switches to the ukulele you hear in his calming tracks. Even for the Hindi film that he composed music for – I Want To Talk by Shoojit Sircar – Taba wrote and composed his melodies, beautiful ones like ‘Musafir’, ‘Gum Ho Kahan’ and ‘Dil Ghabraye’.
Taba says he learned quite a lot, working for a film, from the way he had to cater to a particular emotion for a particular situation, unlike his independent albums in which his songs could be “just about everything.”
But Taba did not find it limiting, it has made him more mature, he says, and he’d love to work in more films like I Want To Talk.
Growing up in Arunachal, Taba had, among the many genres of music his uncle Taba Tagum brought home, listened to Hindi film music. “Uncle would get old cassettes from Shillong – Hindi films and western pop like Michael Learns to Rock or Bryan Adams. When I went to boarding school, I began to listen to more genres – a little pop, some country. I moved out of Arunachal later on, to do something more in music, and began listening to varied genres from Korean pop to Japanese folk.” He even had a stint in a metal band.
But Taba can’t pin his music to a genre. “I just express my emotions and the stories that I want to tell. I can’t tell what genre it falls into. People can take it the way it sounds to them - country, blues, jazz, rock, or pop.”
The expression of a song matters so much to Taba that in his music videos, he sometimes throws in animation, convinced that live action figures can’t do justice to the theme. ‘Walk with me’ – Taba’s song picturing adorable art figures – is animated because, he says, it has a dream-like quality that only artwork can give justice to. His music video of ‘Blush’, his album cover for Bond with Nature, all come with such enchanting artworks.
At 31, Taba claims to have attained a certain maturity, but he still sounds like a man of impulse. After finding the beaches of Kerala too captivating when he came to Kovalam last year for a music festival, Taba flew again to Varkala to shoot a song called ‘Khud ko mila’ for his new album. The new one, yet untitled, is expected to release next month.