What was your favorite album while growing up? What were the songs you used to like and listen to as you moved into your teen years and school life? The present generation feeds on online music where accessibility is not a major issue at all. In the mid-90s till early 2000s cassettes were very popular and getting your favorite music wasn’t as easy as now. Compact-discs aka CDs came into prominence in early 2000s.  I remember asking my dad to purchase me a CD of the OST of Spiderman-2 from the music world store on Hill cart road. I don’t know if the store does good business now but those days it used to be a good place to get one’s preferred music collections. I can still picture the art on the CD cover: the spider in black against the dark-red background. I used to listen to it on the woofer attached to my LG desktop.

Please keep in mind what I am talking about  is what I used to listen to between the year 2000 and year 2007. Few of the albums were released in the same period while others might have been released earlier.

Strings the Pakistan pop-rock band became very popular in India with their album Dhaani, which means light-green color, from the color of raw grain of rice. Their song “Na Jaaney Kyun” was part of the spiderman-2 soundtrack and remains popular. Part of the same soundtrack, I listened to American alternative-rock bands Switchfoot and Train for the very first time. The distortion and acoustic driven dynamics of “Meant to Live” by  Switchfoot and the piano intro for “Ordinary” by Train were very catchy.  Also, another artist that caught my fascination was Yellowcard. The punk-rock track “Gift and Curse” with violin in the background was one of the most thematically fit songs from the soundtrack. 

The Hindi/Urdu rock came into limelight with talented bands from Pakistan. Jal, Strings (mentioned earlier), Entity-Paradigm, and Call  brought Hindi/Urdu rock to India. Of course Junoon with their classic “Sayonee” were the pioneers. Jal  with their album Aadat captured the hearts of the youth with their soothing vocals, lovely guitar riffs on acoustic, and the lyrics painted in feelings of love, loss, memories, and moving on.   The album Dhaani by Strings was another masterpiece. “Dhaani”, “Na Jaaney Kyun”, “Kahani Mohabbat ki”, “Mera Bichraa Yaar” were their best songs followed by “Soniye” and “Pal”. 

The Indie-pop scene was at an all time high in the early 2000s I believe. Euphoria gave us some lovely and fun-filled tracks like “Maeri”, “Tum”, “Ab na jaa”, “Kabhi aana tu meri gali”, “Dhoom”. There was this beautiful track “Dooba Dooba” from silkroute. Mohit Chahuhan singing underwater in the video for the song was a very impressive sight for the audience. Band of boys rocked with “ Gori”, “Aaja meri jaan”, “Meri neend ud gayi hai”, and the romantic number “ Ishq”.  There are always these one-off tracks from not so popular artists. One of them was the track “Sochta hun” by singer-turned-politician Babul Supriyo.  Sochta hun was one of the songs my crush and I both liked. Shaan gave us his all time best I believe in “Tanha Dil” and it had one of the best videos, perfectly suiting the lyrics of the song  believe. Also, there was a soulful romantic number by Pankhaj Udhas' “Aahista aahista ki jiye baatein”—Samira Reddy and a foreigner feature in the really cute video shot in Australia. 

KK's "Pal" and "Yaaron" were beautifully written songs on Love and friendship respectively. In fact the album "Pal" had awesome tracks.  Another superb artist, perhaps someone who possesses such a niche voice, Lucky Ali gave us some wonderful songs: Anjani rahon mein, Tere mere saath, O sanam, dekha hai aise bhi, nahi rakhta dil mein, kitni hassen zindagi. Following which he sang the melodious “ Kyun chalti hai pawan” from the box-office success Kaho na Pyaar hai.

Who can forget the album Paint My love by the Danish soft-rock band  Michael Learns to Rock: The tracks Paint My love, Sleeping Child, Someday, Breaking My Heart, Complicated heart, Love will never lie, The Actor, Crazy Dream,  That’s why you go was one hell of a collection. “From my youngest years to this moment here, I have never seen such a lovely queen…”--- beautiful isn’t it?

Enrique’s album Escape was another smash-hit. The tracks having peppy beats with light layering of guitars were lovely to listen to especially while traveling.  I liked “Escape”,” Don’t Turn of the Lights” and “ Hero” the most, although the other tracks were very good too. Avril Lavigne made her debut with the album Let go .  “Sk8r boy” was proper punk with narrative lyrics. “ Losing Grip” was grungy, followed by the comparatively mellow “ Complicated”,  and the romantic “I’m with you”.  

Few Sadri songs I still remember were sung in churches, during Christmas carols, during our tribal dances on Christmas nights, and on any account of celebrations, be it picnics, marriages were “aije to janam parab”, “ awa chala jab rey”, “ baitulam gohar majhe”, “  jani man kar faishan”, “ bas gadi chalela to hawa lagela”, “hawa lagai dey saihya”.  Three Kurukh(Oraon) songs that come to my mind: Christmas based:  “Kundurkay yesu kundurkay” and “Billi barcha merkhanti puna billi barcha” and an Easter based song, “Eka bari ujja cho’chas prabhus”. 

The list can go on and on. But the idea was to revisit the lovely songs and tracks I listened to while I grew up. And these songs have the power to bring up all sorts of feelings and remind us of various situations and people in our lives. Keep listening and keep enjoying music.