Mumbai: Thirty-one years after Rangeela, lyricist Mehboob’s sharpest memory is not the hit song but the note that forced him to rewrite it. In an interview with News18 Showsha, he returns to the album that began his long partnership with AR Rahman and explains a principle that still guides his writing: a film song has to belong to the person singing it.
The boarding-card rewrite
The first version of Kya Kare Kya Na Kare had already been recorded when Ram Gopal Varma called from Chennai. The emotion worked, Mehboob recalls, but the wording was too polished for Munna. The director’s note, as he remembers it, was that the character could not speak that way. Mehboob boarded a flight and began rewriting the lyrics on the back of his boarding card, stripping out the lyricist’s poetry until only Munna’s speech remained.
That instinct, he says, came from a simple discipline: “You have to listen to the character.” A waiter’s compliment to Varma—that the writer captured how ordinary people speak—remains the validation he values most.
Finding a song inside twenty minutes
Rangeela’s Hai Rama tested a different skill. Rahman had composed a piece roughly twenty minutes long, and Mehboob says he responded by writing lyrics for the entire stretch. Only afterwards did he and Rahman sit in the studio, play the full piece and shape the sections together, deciding what stayed and where each part should land. The released track, he explains, was discovered inside that longer composition through editing rather than written to a fixed three-minute structure.
He contrasts that with today’s practice, where a tune can arrive on a phone and lyricists may never share a room with the composer. He does not romanticise the past, but he notes what has receded: the late-night sittings, tea and conversation that surrounded a song, and the shared understanding that one album could speak in one voice.
What survives when albums splinter
For Mehboob, older soundtracks carried story forward and gave lyricists the whole screenplay before writing. Today’s shorter songs and split credits change that. His advice is not to resist the clock. If a track is only ninety seconds, he says, craft has to reveal itself within those ninety seconds.
The lessons he takes from Rangeela are practical:
- Write from the character’s vocabulary, not the lyricist’s display.
- A long musical idea can become a durable song through patient editing.
- Simplicity is not the enemy of poetry; force is.
He also cautions against chasing “modern” phrasing for its own sake. The pressure should be to write a good song that touches the listener, he says; forcing contemporary language makes it sound unnatural.
Thirty-one years on, Rangeela remains a reference point because its songs speak in different registers — Munna, Mili and others — while holding one album together. That balance, more than any single lyric, is what Mehboob keeps defending.
Source: News18
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