KK - The Friend Who Could Sing

Yeah, it hurts

In my early teens, I had a major problem. All the kids in the family-friend circle were too young to hang out with. There weren’t any cousins nearby, and my best friends lived too far from home to be accessible outside the walls of our school. So I made friends with books, ESPN, and a hand-me-down Sony walkman.

The walkman was cool. We didn’t quite have the a la carte nature of Spotify yet, but in a musically inclined household, I got a diverse palette. My early teens were a ramen pot for emotions, and there was something someone had sung for all of them. I was madly in love with the girl who sat next to me for a month and had insane handwriting. My fellow midfielder in the football team was a friend I would have for life. I actually shed tears when the cable guy said we won’t have network on the night of a World Cup semi-final. And all these emotions registered at ten times the intensity that a situation warranted. So I looked to different writers and singers every day for company and empathy.

There was this one cassette I had - Best of Indiepop or something. It had some Sonu Nigam tracks, a couple of Shaan hits, some songs by Colonial Cousins, and two by KK: Pal and Yaaron. On days when I was either too lazy or emotionally charged for rewinding entire albums, I made do with whatever was in front of me. Pal and Yaaron worked for every emotion. Both songs have sombre sections and soaring crescendos, different instrumentation from what Bollywood and the rest of Indian pop were dishing out, and an amazing balm-like quality. KK’s music would help me come back to equilibrium whenever my mood was playing havoc.

His voice was often an anchor during this uncertain time of my life. I could probably count on one hand the number of days in my adolescence that I felt sure of who I was or what I wanted. I spent many a weekend afternoon just listening to Pal and Yaaron on loop. On good days, those songs carried energy; on others, they helped me heal. It says something that many years later, at school and college farewells, at grown-up ages, Yaaron was still the song of choice. It just captured everything I ever wanted a piece of music to.

Over time, I grew out of Shaan and other pop artists to different music, but I never really got over KK. With the convenience of the internet, I could make an entire playlist of his music. So I did. He was now part of a full pool, sometimes lost behind the stream of discoverable music, but always accessible. He was accessible last weekend when, sleep deprived, I wanted some good music in my ear to get my body into a workable rhythm.

There is another relationship I had with his music. Around the age of 10, I started fiddling with a small Panasonic synthesizer. It had only 49 keys but a bank of hundreds of different sounds. When I got tired of the guitar or piano sound, I would switch to other instruments. I liked the string and woodwind sections the most. Even though I could barely play anything more than the first eight notes of the Mario theme, I tried to imitate different musicians singing the theme. It was fun, and the extent of my repertoire. 

I took an interest in different musical textures. It fascinated me how different a violin sounded from a flute, and how a saxophone could not be played with the same intensity as a piano. There was something similar I noticed about KK. Even with the greatest of ranges, most other singers sound like the first or second violin of a musical setup. They are at their most choral somewhere in the middle of their range. The higher registers sound like a scream — not un-melodic or harsh at all, but just very loud. KK sounded like a flute. At the top of his range, his voice had a soothing quality, the quivers in his throat uneven and emotional. In the quiet phases of his songs, he brought in silence. It was my favourite thing. Everyone else, across genres, seemed too eager to fill in the spaces. There would be filler aalaps or vocal runs between verses, or some random melody during a bridge. Not one syllable of KK’s seemed out of place. Just right is a vague, subjective, and often imaginary concept in art. Everyone interprets things differently. But I would happily use that label for KK. His music never felt out of place.

In my early years of playing live with bands, a critique I would often receive was that I was playing too much. It hurt to hear that because I believe in spacing out compositions. Like with conversations, loud, busy music is not my thing. I have long considered silence the most potent bonding agent between people.

Many years later, an audience-member passed on a quiet compliment to me after a gig. “I like how quiet you sounded. You let the music breathe.” It remains one of my happiest post-performance memories.

It would be gross exaggeration and retro-fitting to suggest that I thought of KK at that point. But now that I think of it, his music must have played a role in shaping that preference. It certainly guided me towards thinking of music as a vehicle for emotions, a tool to extend empathy. And I don’t know if there is a higher compliment I can pay him.

Front row seats at a college festival is the closest I have been to him. But that is just physical distance. Through the headphones, he became a friend who sat down with me and let me pour out my heart. There isn’t a measurable metric for that proximity.