“Won’t you tell me where you are?”
“I'm looking at this incredible view, except you're not in it…”
It’s a phone conversation and if you listen behind the voices, there is a subtle music in the background that grows, quiets down and grows again. Roby Abraham knew it’d work better as background music than a song with lyrics in it. They had talked about it in one of those first meetings about Humans of Someone, a feature film being made by Sumesh Lal, a man who has promoted independent music in Kerala every way he could, first through channels like Rosebowl and then Kappa TV and finally music festivals in Kochi.
So obviously, music plays a very important role in his film and Roby Abraham had taken it up because of that. He was on what he calls an unintentional break from making music for movies, focusing on independent music, his new band Everafter.
“Can't call it mine, it's a team. Madonna Sebastian, Ashwin Aryan and I had come together for a Music Mojo season (music show in Kappa TV). “
“I met Madonna as a singer much before Premam, before she became an actor. Ashwin is a guitarist and musician. We spoke of forming a band together,” Roby says. When they brought out their first song — Veruthe — in January this year, more musicians had joined them — John Thomas of Motherjane on the drums, Rex George on the keyboard and Joel Varghese on the bass. But the line-up changed for their other songs, and the original three with Joel became the core team. By the time Everafter was featured in Music Mojo this year, the band had 12 original compositions. “We decided not to play covers. There’s English and Malayalam. And the genre is what started off as ambient rock. But our newest song coming out this January has elements of electronic music blended with classical rock,” Roby says.
His voice has the excitement that comes out of a man doing what he loves most. “I had worked about 10 to 11 years in corporate companies and I wanted to leave the monotony of it when I switched to a full-time music career. But when I did film music, I felt uncomfortable with another kind of monotony. It could be my problem. When someone asks me to do four hit songs, or make some viral music, I don't know what to do. But I can understand a passionate filmmaker who narrates a sequence and knows what he wants.”
So after Friday, Theevram, Rasputin and You Too Brutus, Roby had been on that unintentional break till Humans of Someone came, where quite a few musicians have worked to create an original sound track.
