Jun 02, 2026 9:00pm IST
‘King’ Composer Duo Sachin-Jigar On Striking A Balance With The Film’s Background Scorer Anirudh Ravichander
Most films in the Hindi music industry tend to employ separate musicians for the soundtrack and the background score. And they do have their reasons. It is rare to see a composer also score the film’s music and that’s a labour that arrives with a significant amount of expectations.
The upcoming Shah Rukh Khan-starrer “King”, directed by Siddharth Anand, is one of the year’s most hotly anticipated films. Bring up the fact that Sachin-Jigar are composing the songs for the film while Anirudh Ravichander is scoring the background music and ask them how they strike a balance for the sound and Sachin Sanghvi reminds you, “Someone else [Ketan Sodha] did the BGM for our biggest hit ‘Stree.’” He adds, “See, our job as composers will be to retain listenership for five minutes. And the background score has to function mainly to retain interest for all two hours. They are serving two different purposes.”
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Jigar Saraiya avers, “Our job is to communicate to the audience: here are the songs, come listen to them.”
Sanghvi pipes back, “We are not indulgent type of people in general, but sometimes we push the director to somehow try and ingrain the songs in the background score, because then, there’s the familiarity and like a family of themes that starts to work in the storytelling. We believe in that, and that's why we profess it, but each to their own, because there are some directors who are more comfortable doing the opposite. Background scoring is a very technical position. It is very crucial to the director in the storytelling. So, sometimes, he brings his own team and then you have to work with it.”
He offers a counter-opinion with the just-released “Chand Mera Dil” starring Ananya Panday and Lakshya, because they’ve composed the songs as well as scored the background music for the film. He notes, “It is such a beautiful place to be. I mean, if you are the only composer on the album and you are also the background scorer, you know that when you came to those songs, you did not come to those songs in your sleep. You came to those songs because you heard a script, you heard about a character, you have heard about their passion or their flaws. So those songs belong to those stories, whether they become popular or not, and somehow, they should rightfully be part of the background score. And then, there are films that don't allow you to do that. There are films like ‘Dhurandhar,’ where the background score then goes on to become the OST of the album. So yeah, you have to respect both processes.”
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