Music that takes you places
In Her Song, Indian actor Kalki Koechlin’s French-language debut, the audience is transported to the world of the French Pyrenees, where everything is quaint, everything is organized, and conflicts are resolved if one wants them to. The music of the film plays no small part in creating the atmospherics that takes us on this journey, and for that we Berklee alum, Dhruv Goel, to thank. Part of the Grammy-nominated album Shuruaat, Goel, who grew up in India, is now an Los Angeles-based film composer and music producer, and has worked with several leading South Asian artists.
On the sidelines of the recently-concluded Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival in Silicon Valley, Goel spoke to Ankita M. Kumar of India Currents to unpack his artistic process and how he draws upon his training and education to break barriers. Director John M. Keller, who picked Goel for the job, and producer Marine Assaiante also chimed in.
(The interview has been edited for clarity.)
Ankita M. Kumar (India Currents): My first question — I want to know your journey to Berklee from India.
Dhruv Goel: I grew up in Lucknow and New Delhi in India and my family was always very much into music. Nobody is a professional musician in my family, but we always grew up around music. From a young age, I was learning Indian classical music. My first performance was probably when I was as young as five. I was always learning and singing and my parents and grandparents really encouraged me. I’m very grateful for that; in music I found a very close companion to express how I viewed the world.
I studied the Dhrupad, a form of Indian Indian classical, for many years with Pandit Nirmalya Dey. He taught me what is called the Dagarvani tradition, which is older than the Khayal style of music in North Indian classical music. In school, I sang for competitions and when I went to college (Delhi University) I formed a band. Our band performed all over the country. But I think somewhere, I was – as with most Indian kids – I was really enamored by what A. R. Rahman was doing. Back then, I was very inspired by the big names like John Powell and Hans Zimmer. I dreamed of studying film music, and I wanted to write music and produce songs for a living.
So I applied to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I got in with a good scholarship and it supported my studies over there. At Berklee I studied jazz and film scoring and electronic music production. It was a combination, because Berklee really offers you a plethora of things. But at music school, something very interesting happened. After moving away from India, and suddenly being put into a setting of a lot of different cultures …I somehow found my Indian-ness in a very interesting way. I didn’t feel pigeon-holed that, ‘oh, I’m now an Indian person’. There were people from almost all parts of the world – from Chile, France, India, Canada. Therein, I found what I bring to the table and what is in my blood. And music was always in my blood. In my family gatherings, there would always be music. After the party, everyone would just sit and sing for hours and hours. …That’s what my childhood memory is – singing these old Talat Mehmood, Muhammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar songs.
My aesthetic became something that was a combination of these two things. At Berklee, I suddenly saw myself starting to write more in Hindi and Urdu. This was motivated by my friends all writing songs in their languages. For example, my Colombian friends were doing stuff in Spanish. It was interesting to kind of bring your own language and then fuse it with another person’s culture and their music. I was one of the founding members of a band called the Berklee Indian Ensemble. We wrote a lot of music and performed it in Boston. Later in 2023, the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best Global Music. But the interesting part for me in my journey in that was that I really embraced my roots in a way that I had not done as a teenager or even in my early 20s…I think there’s something that happens when you mature as a person, as an artist, where you kind of come into your own and you’re like – I don’t know if I need to be someone else.
So the interesting part of that journey becomes that you’re a sum total of all your influences and what interests you. Now I feel like I’m a big masher of stuff that’s very old Bollywood and Indian classical, but mixed with things that I’m very interested in, like electronic music production techniques. I like the world jazz sound, which is something that I’ve always studied and learned. Even when I’m doing film scoring, it’s informed by these pillars of knowledge for me.
I’ve come to a very interesting place where I feel very comfortable in doing what I aesthetically enjoy and I am not trying to emulate a sound or the masters of the craft. The interesting part about trying to emulate someone – not copying – but being inspired by someone is you throw a dart in that direction, but the dart kind of doesn’t fall. Or at least in my case, it doesn’t hit the target; it falls somewhere around it.
I have started to find a lot of joy in trying to find that little trail that’s off the beaten path.
AK: It’s so beautiful that you found your own sound, because from my experience of working with actors and cinematographers, I feel a lot of times in the industry we are forced to align with a certain identity to get work.
You broke the third wall for Indian artists by composing music for Her Song, which is a French-language film. How did you manage to do that?
DG: When I moved to Los Angeles, I worked for a couple of years as an assistant composer with Hans Zimmer, who was my childhood idol. I would really look up to his music, but I didn’t want to conform to that sound. I learned a lot, and I was able to do incredible work. But I think in time, I found that my journey wanted to lead somewhere I could go. There was a lot I wanted to express, and in a certain way. And I was starting to learn that if you have a point of view and an expression that really is true to you, other people will resonate with it.
The journey for Her Song began when I met John (the director) and other team members at the screening of An Arrested Moment by Dev Benegal about the life of James Ivory. It was playing at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I was the composer for this film. Now, James is an executive producer of Her Song. I met the team, and we hit it off. They really liked the music for An Arrested Moment, which is very much in the classical space. It’s minimalism classical with some sound textures thrown in because Dev Benegal is someone who really enjoys interesting sounds.
Now you might wonder what French music I’m going to do about a film that is set in a small French village? John and I started to speak about it, and I was like – I don’t know if I can do super authentic French music. I can study it and replicate it. But what you’re going to get is not quite it, if that’s what you’re looking for.
But John is a very interesting collaborator because, very much like me, he is a non-conformist. He doesn’t want things to be just the traditional way.
I like to challenge the why of things. As a child, when I would be singing songs of other singers, I would keep changing them for no reason. Sometimes my teachers and even my parents would get annoyed.
There is freedom, expression, and expansion of a body of art. And I think John and I really connected on that because he said he doesn’t want a very French-sounding score. What ended up happening was that we synthesized different instruments, focusing on diversity. For example, there are a few Brazilian characters in the film, so we used Brazilian instruments. There are people from Italy in the film as well, along with people from France. Kalki is, of course, Indian, and then James Ivory – of Merchant and Ivory – has an Indian connection.
So we were, like, why don’t we just embrace the global nature of this movie? Even though everything is set in this French village, the experience is so universal. The lead instruments in the score were an instrument called cavaquinho, which is Brazilian. We have also used an Afghan drum. I was using a lot of world percussion, standard clarinets, drum sets, and accordion. The accordion is played by a Brazilian musician.
We tried to chase the energy and the mood instead of being very specific about the instrumentation of it. That somehow landed us in a place that was very interesting for all of us. Because we don’t necessarily want to just feel like we are prancing down a French village. We want to feel like there’s something a bit off. But we wanted to make it light. I’m just trying to articulate the inarticulable feeling of finding that sound that we were trying to sound French, but not be French. John and I really bonded over being non-conformists.
AK: A part of the music that really stayed with me was that one sequence where Olivia is sitting and suddenly gets up and the music quickly shifts. I don’t know how you nailed that to signify the writer’s mind, because that’s exactly how a writer’s mind works.
DG: I genuinely want to say film is such a collaborative art form. And that’s one of my favorite parts of my job. When we were planning this scene, we were discussing that it’s a burst of energy. How do we capture this burst of energy? So we found a motif that was – playing this on the cello, not making the bass do the job. This was the first thing I heard in my head. It’s like this thing that just meanders through the way she figures out what the story is. We also brought in percussion and drums, which was just an explosive energy thing.
There was so much conversation happening around the compositions. I truly believe that some of the most interesting pieces of art are always conversations. They don’t always have to come from one mind. But of course, the collaboration has to be open. People have to be amenable.
And I think there is something interesting about the French and Indian way of collaborating…They are cultures that like experimentation. They have tradition, but they’re open to pushing boundaries make something new. And I think it really worked out for Her Song.
AK: Why did you choose to make your debut as a composer with an indie film?
DG: I have done a couple of feature films before. This is my first narrative drama. I was more in the documentary world before this. I think what I choose now comes from maturing as an artist because I choose a feeling and choose to work on strong, powerful stories.
There’s a saying in our industry – people, pay, project. Two out of the three things have to really hit for you. And that’s the beautiful part about working with incredible people.
I’m grateful that John and I got to tussle with each other. I would often bring something to John and be like, this is perfect. And he’d be like, it’s not working at all. I was like, “Oh no! I spent the entire week thinking about it!”. Then we would just sit down and I’d be like, here’s another idea I had. But I abandoned it because I thought it was too simple. And he’d be like, “are you kidding me?” Well, so much of it comes from the discard. Right? The little piece of something that didn’t turn into anything is actually the real nugget.
Marine Assaiante (Producer): You guys (John and Dhruv) work very well together. It’s hard to find the right project to work on, after that you need to find the right people. Sometimes it’s not that the person is not great, but it just doesn’t match. And John was working with Dhruv for the first time and vice versa.
Some people have egos and they don’t like feedback. It’s really important how well you work together.
DG: To add on that, when I was starting off, I would often think that a comment on the art is a comment on me. If someone critiqued what I made was a critique of me. I saw an AR Rahman interview and it really changed things for me. Rahman said that people talking about my music is not the same as people talking about me. I took it to heart. And when someone says, I don’t think this works at all – they’re not saying that what I make doesn’t work or it’s bad. Of course, if I spend a week on something and it doesn’t work, it still stings a bit, because you’ve made something and you’ve grown in love with it. But the maturity of an artist also lies in the fact you see things from another person’s perspective.
AK: Dhruv and John, I would love to know more about the score. John, what was your vision? What did you want to achieve with the score? How did you get the right pacing in as well?
John (Director): Get a really good composer like this guy (laughs) and make it explosive and make sure that we don’t have these quiet cliché sounds that we hear in other movies. We were really going for something completely new with this. The movie is called Her Song. So the music has to rise to that title.
DG: A lot of times, music is really just meant to be felt and not heard. And for a lot of films, that is what the narrative needs. But for a movie, that is called Her Song, both of us were on the same page. That music is a character in the film, but like any good play that you see, if the spotlight is on too many people all the time, it becomes very confusing for anyone to follow. So, you need to know when music needs to come into the spotlight. And when it’s just a background character.
That is the way the music plays in this entire film. There are many places where the music is just tinkering at the back, like when Olivia is doing something or going about her day. Because it creates a mood. We were very intentional. You throw things at the wall, and then see what sticks. And sometimes something sticks. And it’s very good. I think there’s a lot of serendipity that goes into making any kind of art.
We were trying to crack this one scene. But it was just not working. It was the one we spent the most time on. It’s a scene where Kalki’s character is thinking, and she starts to lose her sense of taste.
AK: As a viewer, I thought that scene came very easily to you. I’m surprised.
JK: Interestingly, we had a temp track that we just loved. We thought – no one is ever going to be able to top this. So we gave it to him, and then he took it ten levels higher. It’s just one of the most wonderful things in the world. It’s (the music) also perfectly suited to the images unfolding. That makes it even more special. I don’t think it was an easy scene to grab. It was almost an impossible challenge.
JK to DG: You told me at the beginning, make sure you tell me the truth. And don’t hold anything back.
DG: He just flips the compliment around. I think it is very endearing to work with people who are not making it about themselves.
AK: If a kid is sitting in some part of India right now looking at you and wondering that I want a career like Dhruv Goel – I want to work on La La Land, I want to work on Star Wars– what would you say to them?
DG: I am now a young parent. I have a three-month-old. It is good to give direction, but kids have an intuition. We can just help them do what they love and teach them not to try to emulate or try to just work on that one big project. You can do it fully on your own. This is what the world of today allows now. Distribution is becoming less and less of a challenge. So if you make something truly unique and beautiful, that speaks to people – it just catches fire. You don’t need all these big studios and labels.
I wish a kid who is looking at me would just know that. If you follow what you love and really just keep doing it, life figures itself out. I wish I were less crazy about trying to work with my heroes when I was younger. I wish I spent more time just trying to do what I want to do. That would be my advice.
