Mallanna A Huge Hit - Devi Sri Prasad

"First of all I would like to thank all our media friends for dropping by. Yeah, the Audio’s been a huge hit and I am very happy. I’ve been getting a lot of calls of late congratulating me for the wonderful score and the feeling is just great". These Are Said By MR. DEVI

How are you enjoying the success of 'Mallana’ Audio?

First of all I would like to thank all our media friends for dropping by. Yeah, the Audio’s been a huge hit and I am very happy. I’ve been getting a lot of calls of late congratulating me for the wonderful score and the feeling is just great. The album, which was released, was a roaring success and we are seeing similar response in Telugu too. So we are sort of double happy. So once again, I would like to thank our producer Thanu, Director Susi Ganesan, Hero Vikram, our cameraman Ekambaram for his brilliant picturization of the songs and all our musicians, singers and technicians.
Tell us the story behind Vikram lending his voice to the songs and the highlights?

The biggest asset of the audio is definitely the voice of Vikram. If the hero of the film needs to sing, it will generally be a single song but in the case of our film all the songs have been sung by Vikram. This is another first for our film. But all that credit goes to the director who actually suggested me to consider the option as he was impressed by Vikram’s voice in a personally recorded CD. Me being experimental by nature was very excited and told him that we will go ahead if the voice suits though I was a bit hesitant about how Vikram will take it if it doesn’t suit. But director Susi Ganesan reassured me and thus we approached Vikram. I should admit that I was very impressed with his down to earth behavior when he left aside his superstar status and told me its okay Devi, go ahead with the recording only if u think my voice fits in, else I have no issues’. So we proceeded with the recording of the song and frankly I was spellbound at his mastery. In fact so impressed was I that I suddenly wanted Vikram to sing all the songs in the film. Next is the song “excuse me Mr.Mallana”. The beauty of this song is that it is basically a mix of lyrics and dialogues and we wanted it to look very natural. So Vikram became the obvious choice as there wouldn’t be any changeover of voices between the song and the dialogues. The fact that Suchitra, who dubbed for Shriya, was the female singer of the song gave it a really good feel. The effortless ease with which the alternations between the song and dialogue take place gave it a real natural feel. The style basically resembles Hollywood musicals. Though Bhanumathi, P.V. Chinnappa, Thiyagaraja Bhagavathar and Chandrababu used to sing their songs themselves, the style is almost non-existent these days. So we thought this experiment would definitely be appreciated by the audience and went ahead. What we thought is why not let Vikram sing this song as well as the entire project would then become a nice Hero’s album and that’s how all the songs in the film happened.

Tell us about the singers and the recording?

The director wanted to have a remix as a situation in the film demands it. But I felt that remixes are quite common and told the director why not experiment around a bit and suggested him the idea of making a new song that includes in between, lines from an old song. Susi Ganesan liked the idea very much and encouraged me to go ahead. The main advantage of this is that whilst one cannot show the original footage from the film before it’s actual release, the promotional song enables one to do so. Susi Ganesan has got a great taste when it comes to music as he tries to present different episodes of a film be it action or romance in a musical way. So much so, that 'Mallana’ can even be called a total musical. I had this idea of a promotional since a long time and as the director too was also very keen on this, we went ahead with the experiment. So that how the promotional happened.