How Lucky Ali and Mikey McCleary’s Converging Paths Led Them to ‘Intezaar’

A whole year prior to the global pandemic, Lucky Ali says he felt a tremor of dread about the future. “I just felt that the world is going to stop,” the veteran singer and composer says over a Zoom call. The ensuing lockdowns and feelings of isolation may have persisted across the world, but Ali says that even in resting and in silence, there can be healing. “Music comes after the healing,” he adds.

With longtime associate and composer-producer Mikey McCleary, new songs emerged with the same rustic yet enchanted flourish of some of their greatest hits, including “O Sanam” from the 1996 album Sunoh. The first new material – part of an upcoming album –  is “Intezaar,” which nimbly plays up the folksy pop Ali is known and loved for. “This is the first of many songs that are going to come out as a compilation. It’s an album, but we’ll be releasing it one song at a time. Then once five or six videos are out, we will compile it and present it as an album,” Ali says.

Accompanied by a music video directed by Bengaluru-based Lendrick Kumar, a story of “greater love,” hope and persistence plays out over McCleary’s sparkling, subtly dramatic production. True to McCleary’s years of grinding it out in the Indian music world and floating his project The Bartender, there’s a horn section and rich guitar melodies to drive “Intezaar” and its affectionate lyrics, co-penned by I.P. Singh (from rock act Faridkot).

Notching up over 2.7 million views on YouTube already, the duo are mighty pleased with the dent that “Intezaar” has made in the fast-moving world of independent music. McCleary adds over the Zoom call, “People who I know have said that the magic that was there [earlier] is still just as vibrant. I think people have been waiting for it.”

The release comes at a juncture where both artists – Ali and McCleary – have had their own journeys in the Indian music industry, honing and presenting distinctive sounds. Ali has forever been the troubadour who championed the Indipop movement since the nineties, and McCleary became a go-to producer in ads, T.V. and film music in the country, setting up a studio and keeping business brisk. “Intezaar,” then, is that convergence of two artists who always stuck to their sound.

Ali says about returning to work with McCleary, “I just knew I was going back home.” In the process of making music together and finding “commonality” as the singer puts it, Ali felt that nothing had changed all along. “I mean, at the end of the day, you might have grown older and more experienced in different areas, but the vibe is the same, the soul is the same. Nothing has changed in that aspect,” he says.

McCleary agrees that their unique way of working goes beyond production techniques and stays at the heart of songwriting. “We’ve always made music where someone could sit down with an acoustic guitar and play the song and sing the song. Even though the production has been important, it’s never been production-based,” the producer-composer explains. He recalls how, with Sunoh, digital recording was still at a nascent stage. McCleary adds, “We were working on eight digital tracks, then having to bounce down tracks and create space for new things and link up all different MIDI machines in order to make the music.”

Working remotely and through the Internet, the duo still took their time with “Intezaar.” McCleary even reveals it was a song they had “worked on in the past and just sort of parked it” much before they decided to record an album’s worth of material. The producer passed it on to Singh for his take and possible inputs. Ali adds, “We played around with the words a bit, and got it to a position where I always felt comfortable singing the song. We just kept on sending files across to and fro.”

For Ali – who had previously traveled to Israel and recorded songs like “On My Way” and “Amaraya” as part of his collaborative project Lemalla with Israeli artist Eliezer Cohen Botzer a few years earlier – it was important to be together in the room to make music. “I think that the level of connection is greater when you’re [there] in person. But you know, we’ve learned to work remotely… I kind of got reintroduced to the way we used to record music in India, [with] all the musicians in one recording studio. There were barriers and recording rooms. Everybody just at one time, I would like to achieve that again. I think that’s a very spirited form of putting your music together,” the singer says.

Forthcoming material includes songwriting efforts from the likes of Syed Aslam Noor (a regular lyricist for Ali), Ankur Tewari and others. McCleary says, “As we release the singles, I think people will say, ‘Oh, yeah, I can hear the soul of it and their stamp there.’ But it is quite different. Some of the songs may fit a little bit more in the pocket of what people say is our sound. And then with the other ones, there’ll be some sort of surprise to the interpretation of the songs too.”

Listen to “Intezaar” below. Stream on more platforms here.