AR Rahman on SuperHeavy’s second single 'Satya Meva Jayate'

AR Rahman tells Sunayana Suresh about his band SuperHeavy’s second single Satya Meva Jayate and their future plans.

What was the idea behind choosing the mantra Satya Meva Jayate as the lyrics of SuperHeavy’s second single?
It was a long dream for me, to take one of the morals of Indian culture, which is Satya Meva Jayate and make it into a song. Dave said, “AR we want your voice in this album and we want this to be a great Indian song too.” I said it would be historic; if Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damien Marley, Dave Stewart and me come together for a song like this. In a way, it’s iconic. We all acted spontaneously at that point and started doing the song and I didn’t have any other lyrics than Satya Meva Jayate. I only knew that it had to be this song but had nothing else. We filled in the lyrics later and added in the choir to create an epic of sorts.

In your own life, have you seen truth win over everything?
At some point or the other in life, you will see truth always prevails.

With two singles already rocking, what can audiophiles expect from SuperHeavy’s upcoming album?
SuperHeavy is a musical team and each of us has a distinct style. If you look at the five of us, we have all been driving our own thing and have our own following. So we bring in very different influences to the table. When it is a collaboration of such a scale, sometimes you have to take a back seat and just let music be made naturally. But SuperHeavy does have strong Indian influences.

So many varied musical inspirations with the band members, how long does it take to narrow down on one track?
It terms of narrowing down on tracks, some songs would go 20-25 minutes of jam session and then they are all chopped down and brought into a format. Out of maybe 28 ideas for songs we narrowed it down to 16 or 17.
 
Does SuperHeavy have plans of composing music for soundtracks?
At the moment we are busy with our album SuperHeavy which will release next month. If we plan on composing music.
 
Would you ever use your fellow band members’ voices for one of your Indian film compositions?
You never know!