Thought Shaan was at the top of his game? Hardly. Newer, cheaper voices and the recession are forcing one of India’s most popular playback singers, and his contemporaries, to reinvent themselves.

Shantanu Mukherjee’s house in Bandra, Mumbai, with its stark white fibreglass staircase, Alex Davis-designed cascading chandelier, glass façade and his collection of artefacts, sprawls over four floors. This is his fourth home in about eight years. “We keep shifting and putting our old homes on rent. Because of the smart investments my wife has made, I can afford not to worry about money,” he says.
It also means that Shaan, as the singer-musician is popularly known, can afford to take a mid-career break. “I am in a transition zone,” he says, reflecting on his almost 10-year long music career, which seems to have come to a halt midway. There aren’t many playback singing offers coming his way, he admits, leaning back on the bright red bench kept just outside his cube-shaped music room on the terrace.
Shaan is wearing a white and blue shirt with the top four buttons left open and white jeans. He is an amiable sort of guy, unfailingly courteous, but with a distant look in his eyes. He is obviously trying to choose the right words to describe his dilemma. “Being at a loose end,” he says, “is a new feeling.” Shaan is 36. He has dominated Bollywood playback singing for the past 10 years along with contemporaries like Sonu Nigam, Udit Narayan, KK and Kunal Ganjawala, and has sung in 181 films, a large number by any standard. His chartbusters include hip-hop number ‘One Love’ (Bluffmaster), the rebellious ‘Main Aisa Kyun Hoon’ (Lakshya), the peppy ‘Chaand Sifarish’ (Fanaa) and the soulful ‘Jab Se Tere Naina’ (Saawariya).
Son of music director Manas Mukherjee, Shaan began his career as a pop singer in 1995 with a remix album, Q-Funk, and then spent an uneventful five years until his album Tanha Dil caught the attention of music lovers. More popular numbers and awards followed, and so did all those houses and Mercedes cars. “I have sung for every music director in this industry — Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Vishal-Shekhar, Bappida (Lahiri) and Pritam (Chakravarty),” he says. “Some days, I have spent up to 10 hours in a studio.”
And now, suddenly, the singer finds himself out of work, much like his colleagues Nigam, KK and Narayan. In the prime of their careers, they find they have been edged out by newer, cheaper voices. Singer Alka Yagnik, a little senior to Shaan, says, “Singers like Lata and Ashaji had a long run in the industry. Their careers lasted 40, 50 years. But with the diffusion of work to fresh, often untrained singers, the younger generation of good playback singers like Shaan, Mahalakshmi Iyer and Sunidhi Chauhan haven’t got the chance to explore their full potential.”
Is it the economics (new voices come cheaper) or is it because music in Bollywood has changed? It’s both, actually. Shaan and Sonu’s melodious voices are considered to be typically filmi and suitable for the romantic songs that once dominated the soundtrack of almost all Hindi films. But these voices don’t always work for all kinds of music. Composers today are combining genres as varied as hip-hop, rock, jazz, Sufi and electronica to come up with scores that are, as music director Shekhar Rajviani puts it, “more global music than filmi”. “We are a generation that grew up on world music,” says Chakravarty. “Obviously, these influences show up in our work.”
Different compositions require different kinds of voices. Oscar winner A R Rahman says he looks for “a unique quality in a voice these days. One singer’s voice may be suitable for a rock-style song and another’s could work well for a Sufi number”.
In this dynamic musical landscape, singers like Shaan are rapidly being replaced. Mohit Chauhan, once a lead singer with the now disbanded Silk Route, is a favourite with composers and has sung some of the successful numbers of recent times like ‘Tum Se Hi’ (Jab We Met) and ‘Masakalli’ (Delhi 6). Chennai-based singer Benny Dayal is Rahman’s blue-eyed boy and has lent his voice to several of his compositions like ‘Tu Hi Meri Dost Hai’ (Yuvraaj) and ‘Rehna Tu’ (Delhi 6).

Then there are the singers thrown up by the various music reality shows on television, two of which Shaan himself has hosted for years. Mahesh Bhatt has thrown his weight behind Toshi Sabri, who sang ‘Tujhe Dil Se Laga Ke Yun’ (Raaz 2). “His voice,” says Bhatt, “is perfect for Sufi-style songs and numbers that need to be sung at a high pitch.”
So what does Shaan think of the infusion of new voices in Bollywood? “I look at it as a trend. I feel I am always second to a trend. A year ago, I was second to Himesh Reshammiya. Now, I am in competition with the singers thrown up by reality music shows. What was once considered to be an amateur voice is now being sold as a fresh one. Playback singing is a specialised job. Apart from the brief given by the music director, the singer brings in his own personality and perception to a number.”
Recession is partly to blame too. The bad times have hit the film and music industry hard, and if you can pay Rs 2,000 to a new singer, why would you want to pay Rs 20,000 to an established one? Shaan says the last “big set-up” he sang for was Karan Johar’s Dostana.
Is this a passing phase? “As long as everyone out there (the composers, the music labels and the directors) is happy with the situation, it will last.”
Shaan is responding to the circumstances by pushing the envelope. He’s certainly not falling back on television. For the last five years, the singer has been a big name on television and taken home, some say, over Rs 1 lakh per episode. Shaan hosted the music show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa on Zee TV for three years, and then switched channels with his mentor Gajendra Singh and hosted Voice of India for two years on Star Plus. Singh says Shaan brought a fresh style of anchoring to music reality shows. “When he started out, he was a bit gauche and didn’t know much Hindi. He was also in awe of the musicians who judged the shows. But what kept him going was his spontaneity and his unmatchable charm.” According to Deepti Vohra, a former producer with Zee TV, Shaan is “an estrogen magnet”. “He was fabulous with most contestants, but the girls on the shows absolutely adored him.”
Shaan admits that though “hosting a music show was never really part of my plan, the money was decent and the exposure was fantastic”. The shows were partly responsible for his soaring career graph. He has never really had to chase a music director for a chance to sing — he met most of them on the sets of the shows he hosted. Networking, as he will tell you, plays a large role in getting you the right kind of work.

Now, he recently conceptualised a musical for a private company, a love story that had “drama, music, dancing and it was quite an eye-opener”. He is attempting to straddle genres and is working on an electronica album for T-Series, though he is finding it difficult to sell that to his music label. “I have an image of a pop star, a man who sings soft, romantic numbers and the music company wants me to keep that image going. They want to play safe. But today’s generation is exposed to so many different kinds of sounds.”
But he’s optimistic. Shaan believes that the flood of new singers and the drought of playback opportunities may actually do him good. “It will force me to expand my boundaries,” he says. Shaan is also planning to record with new and unknown music directors who have recently approached him. “For me, that translates into a lot more space and freedom. They are very receptive to my inputs about lyrics, music and vocal nuances.”
Where does he see himself five years from now? “Doing a bit of playback and, more importantly, experimenting with my music. I just got myself a guru and am learning classical music. I plan to retire from Bollywood by the time I am 41 and maybe work only on private albums.”

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