ANKUR TEWARI AND HIS MUSIC OF CHANGE

He is a singer, songwriter, music composer and music supervisor, and has aced the game of future proofing his works by having the pulse on the present. After dropping his new album Akela a few months back, Ankur Tewari is now gearing up to charm the ears of his fans with the music for Zoya Akhtar's The Archies, and then there is the second seasonof Coke StudioBharat Coke StudioBharat. Wegetthemaverickmusiciantospillsometeaoverhotcupsoflranichai Tranichai

- Anurag Tagat

Good Luck Café, a typical Mumbai-style Irani restaurant near Bandra's historic Mehboob Studio, is a favorite haunt for Ankur Tewari. The informal seating and the anonymity here helps him enjoy sitting with strangers of various stripes, talking to them and listening in on their conversations. "If you go and have chai there, you can easily drop into these people's conversations and hear so much," he says excitedly. "You get exposed to so many lives. I like the idea that you can share your table with someone you don't know. It's very intimate when you sit across the table with someone and that idea... it's kind of in sync with my life."

Tewari lives in Bandra and much of what he does revolves around here (including the cover photography for this article was done on his building terrace) and Good Luck Café is an integral part of his life. It has provided him rich material for the many songs he has written for himself and others, and of course his work as a poet. Songs like - Parwana, the opening track of his new album Akela - are drawn from his time here. "I don't know if it's entirely true, but I remember vaguely a person talking about the love of their life and how they will go to any extent to be with their love. I don't know if the whole song is from there, but one part of the emotion comes from a conversation I had at Good Luck," he says.

The psychedelic and brooding Akela with its eight tracks is Tewari’s first full-fledged aloum in more than a decade, notwithstanding an occasional EP or his work as a lyricist for other singers. It’s been a hectic period in his career where his new assignment as the creative architect” of the re-launched and rebranded Coke Studio Bharat is only the latest in a long list of music-related digressions that has occupied him. The most prominent of which has been his work as music supervisor’ for films and OTT shows.