Aparshakti Khurana Opens Up About New Song ‘Balle Ni Balle’ and How Actors Are Connected to Music

Aparshakti Khurana was (and always has been, he insists) drawn to music before he became an actor. “My connection with music was a lot more than with acting. It’s just by chance that acting has kept me busy since the past six years,” he says over a phone call.

The Chandigarh-born artist who scored roles in Bollywood films such as Dangal, Street Dancer and Badrinath Ki Dulhania has more screen appearances than singles to show for it, but he’s slowly changing that. His latest single “Balle Ni Balle” is a finessed Punjabi pop song described as a “Gen Z breakup anthem” by Sony Music India.

Centered on a chill guitar riff and roomy percussive and drum elements, the song was born when Khurana was having a late-night jam with lyricist Gurpreet Saini at actor Sanya Malhotra’s house. “Some thing just came up. I was on the ukulele and he was just narrating a story to the people there,” Khurana says. When it came time to call it a night, Saini mentioned to Khurana that he’d written a song that he was working on with composer Siddharth Amit Bhavsar. The actor-singer’s association with Saini spans more than 10 years, but they’d never had a chance to make music together.

Upon hearing the song, Khurana rang up Saini and asked to record a scratch. Right after pitching it to Sony and getting a green light, they began completing “Balle Ni Balle.” Khurana adds, “I think at every step, people were blessing the song.” He notes how he shared the song with actor Rahul Bose, who doesn’t even understand Punjabi. “He was like, ‘It could have been a song in Spanish or anything, but I can groove to this composition in the middle of the night!’”

The track builds upon Khurana’s long-standing resolve to make music. While his brother Ayushmann Khurrana has been keeping his own music projects running, Aparshakti ties his kinship with music to being a former radio jockey as well as being friends with musicians back in Chandigarh, including rock band The Local Train’s drummer Sahil Sarin. “I do try to jam with my current and former musician friends, and make music in whatever little time I get between projects,” he says.

Much before radio – and even prior to his stint as a cricketer – Khurana joined the dots between acting and music when he took on roles in musicals and street plays in Chandigarh and New Delhi, where he was studying law and mass communication, respectively. He says about his days acting in street plays, “Whenever the director thought that there was something musical in it, like if we needed someone with a dafli or a dholki or a guitar, they would always call me. They never called me for acting,” Khurana says with a laugh.

The freedom from being characterized and carrying a persona is part of why music continues to be alluring to him. “I can be myself and exercise the kind of musicality I want to be attached with. Vis-à-vis a film, I have to play somebody else. I have to do what the director asks me to do. What drives me to come back to music, after having that hectic acting schedule, is that I want to be myself for some time,” he says.

There are a couple more songs in the pipeline for Khurana and a few more collaborations. “I will definitely be doing more music this year, I can already see a few conversations going in the right direction. You’ll see me a lot more involved in music than in the past few years,” he says.

On the acting front, there are a few more appearances Khurana will be seen in. It also marks a shift in the on-screen personas he’s usually taken on. “Initially, I was only playing fun comic characters. For the past few years, I have played a couple of really dark, intense characters like in [spy thriller] Berlin, which I just completed. One of them is a web show for Amazon, which is directed by Vikramaditya Motwane,” Khurana says.

Watch the video for “Balle Ni Balle” below.