Roja was A. R. Rahman’s debut album, released in 1992. What’s strange about it is that it hasn’t aged — put it on now and it still sounds refreshing and new, which is not something you can say about most film soundtracks from thirty years ago.
I was genuinely curious about how someone creates something that mesmerising on a first attempt. So I started digging: pulling the songs apart, working out what was actually going on inside them, learning whatever I needed to learn to understand what I was hearing.
That’s where the idea for this series came from. Episode 1 is Chinni Chinni Aasa — the song that started the digging, and the reason there are any other episodes at all.
Episode 1 of Beyond Listening. The Elements episode covers the vocabulary if you want it first.