Taba Chake on Being ‘Super Happy’ and Crafting an Ode to School Crushes with New Song ‘Udd Chala’

School days are the visual and lyrical inspiration for Arunachal Pradesh singer-songwriter Taba Chake’s groovy new Hindi song “Udd Chala.” He might sound a tad old when he gets nostalgic about growing up in the Nineties, but he does have a point. “Now the school world and everything is different after phones and social media have come in. ‘Udd Chala’ talks about the Nineties in the way you fell in love with a person, at first sight and maybe it happened up to the 2000s. Ab toh seedha ‘I love you’ hota hai [Now people just say ‘I love you’ directly].” There’s no daydreaming, the guy will just text saying ‘I love you,’” Chake says with a laugh.

Taking time out from jamming for a gig in Dibrugarh, it’s been about three years since the indie artist moved back to his native Arunachal, living in Itanagar and getting the chance to spend time with family and also changing his songwriting environment. He did write “Udd Chala” just before the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, however, spending most of the subsequent time making “a lot of corrections.” Working with his go-to producer Ritwik De in New Delhi, the two met in Arunachal first to put down layers, inspired by the Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s sound. “I want to take that inspiration from older songs but still make it a modern song,” Chake says.

Another key collaborator on the song is Chake’s childhood friend and musician Jannong Moidam, who’s simply credited in the video description of “Udd Chala” in a special thanks section, for helping the artist complete the song. Chake says of Moidam, “We used to do a lot of jamming together when we were in school and wrote songs together in Hindi and English way back in 2008.” From Pakistani rock bands to Bollywood to indie rock, Chake often turned to Moidam for Hindi vocabulary and help with lyrics. “He [Moidam] had also studied Sanskrit from class one to class nine, so he had a good understanding. I would call him up when I used to get confused with Hindi words and if I wanted to put more emotion into the lyrics and synonyms. I didn’t want to Google because every word then sounds filmy, you know?” Chake says with a laugh.

With the release of his album Bombay Dreams in 2019, it was evident that Chake was making that push with Hindi songs while also keeping English and Nyishi-led songs intact to retain his identity as a modern Indian, Arunachalese singer-songwriter. “My interest [with writing songs in Nyishi] was to preserve it,” he says. The responsibility that comes with the undertaking worries Chake at times, but dismisses it as a passing feeling. “I might get fewer listeners if I put out a Nyishi song instead of a Hindi song, but the audience is different,” he adds.

To that end, Chake has spoken before about writing in Assamese, but he promises there’s material coming up soon. “I think I speak good Assamese, even though I can’t read or write. My dad keeps saying, ‘You speak well in Assamese, why don’t you write or sing in Assamese?’ We did it this time,” he adds.

One of the biggest changes like being closer to family is understanding how he didn’t need to be in his previous base in Mumbai to make it as a professional musician. The singer-songwriter says he was often focused more on how to make money and pay rent while he was in Mumbai, with the motivations affecting his output. “I realized whether I’m in Mumbai or Delhi or Arunachal, I was writing my own songs; so it didn’t matter where I was,” Chake says.

It helps that there are more direct flights from Itanagar to cities around India and that the roads are also much better, even in Ziro where the video for “Udd Chala” was directed by Gautam Arora with the script of a fresh-brewing, hormonal and escapist school romance by Sukanya Subramaniyan. Chake says, “Originally we were going to shoot in Goa, but they decided not to take up that story and I told them to come to Ziro and I’d sort everything out.”

From getting permissions from the local school to lining up school students and more, Chake and his team created a gleeful music video. All of it points to Chake being exactly where he wants to be. “You can see, you can see the changes and you can listen to my voice, I’m more happy than before. I used to be so sad and I was worried about my life [in Mumbai]. I was worried about everything because I need to think about too many things. All that is gone now. I’m seriously super happy,” he says.