MUMBAI: With music being the soul of Suneel Darshan’s ‘Ek Haseena Thi Ek Deewana Tha’ (EHTEDT), the challenging task for the filmmaker of the romantic mystery was to create an album justifying the movie theme.

While it took the veteran filmmaker almost five months to finalise the songs of his film, it’s the journey and his association with the music maestro Nadeem (of Nadeem-Shravan fame) that has been a memorable journey.

Suneel Darshan recollects, “When I decided to make EHTEDT and collaborate with Nadeem on the project, I wanted to lock the film’s music and songs before going into the stage of pre-production. After sending him the script and situations, I set up an appointment with Nadeem in Dubai and when I was there, he was ready with his plethora of compositions. He had a variety of songs for each situation. He sang the songs to me and I selected the ones I liked.”

“Once the music and songs fell in place, we came back to India with the rough format of five songs. Then we employed music arrangers here and they set up the musical arrangements and the tunes were recorded. The basic strength of Nadeem’s melody had to be retained and at the same time, I had to take the music forward to 2017. So we blended it in such a way that we had strong melodies and contemporary orchestration happening,” he adds.

Suneel has previously worked with Nadeem in several musical hits including ‘Ek Rishta: The Bond of Love’, ‘Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya’, ‘Andaaz’, ‘Barsaat’, ‘Dosti’, ‘Mere Jeevan Sathi’ and ‘EHTEDT’ mark their seventh project together.

“The lingering ability of the title track was so strong that after I finished shooting the movie, I came back and recorded one more version of the song, which was more of the ‘Coke Studio’ kind of a format,” he recollects.