Nab the melody!

“When making a song for a big American artiste, you have to think of cooler things. One must stick to a box and consider what will work on the radio. Here, you’re not worried about being cool. The melody needs to be bigger. A lot of the [music] is minimal, including the hip-hop tracks. Also, in this film, I wasn’t conversing with an artiste. I was talking to characters, via the script.”

Kotecha traces his journey in the industry to the time when the Backstreet Boys were not famous. A record company owner, who had then signed on the “new band”, had approached Kotecha for his skills. When he expressed his desire to be like them, instead of work behind the scenes, he was reminded of how “no girl in Wisconsin will put [the poster] of an Indian guy on her wall”. Kotecha’s response was a simple, “Okay.” Thereafter, he began to work as a songwriter, penning tracks that are, today, on everyone’s lips.  But whether he worked for the two-decade old Westlife, or young pop artistes like Ariana Grande, he says he has been favoured by his focus on melody. “A great melody, no matter what genre it has been made for, will succeed. If you can master creating melodies, you can survive genre shifts.” Meanwhile, a comedy on the story of his South Asian boy band is in the works with Universal Pictures.