The Local Train: ‘We Never Believed In Putting Something Out Just for the Sake of Staying Relevant’

With the release of rock band The Local Train’s “Tu Hai Kahaan” with pop veteran Lucky Ali on vocals, they were back on people’s feeds after at least a couple of years away from the limelight following the exit of their vocalist-guitarist Raman Negi.

The song was part of the newly-released movie soundtrack Do Aur Do Pyaar, but was originally created in around 2022. There hadn’t been much in terms of news from The Local Train’s camp, but bassist Ramit Mehra, guitarist Paras Thakur and drummer Sahil Sarin tell Rolling Stone India that there were very much signs of life. Thakur says over a Zoom call, “We do understand from the outside perspective that there was radio silence for people. But internally, we never stopped. It was never like there was a decision to [think], ‘Do we get back to this and all?’ It was never that. We were constantly working, but we needed to get a little more perspective.”

Thakur says the band had been active for so long that they did want to get back to it with an intent to “serve something” and come from a place that they connected with. To that end, The Local Train were never too far apart – even though Thakur now stays in a remote village (“I live deep inside an apple orchard on the slope of a mountain,” he says) in North India and Mehra and Sarin moved back to Chandigarh.

The trio were still in touch on the regular, working internally in search for the connection as they regrouped. They had listening sessions, wrote down and discussed song ideas. “But we never believed in putting something out just for the sake of staying relevant,” Thakur adds. Being approached to work on a song for Do Aur Do Pyaar turned out to be just the catalyst to spur the band into action after a lot of “reassessing and realigning,” according to Thakur. The romantic drama, starring actors Vidya Balan, Pratik Gandhi, Ileana D’Cruz and Sendhil Ramamurthy, is produced by Applause Entertainment and Ellipsis Entertainment Production, with the soundtrack released via Panorama Music.

Mehra recalls that when the filmmakers first approached The Local Train, the band members were in the process of shifting and resetting. “At that time, Himanshu [Chowdhury, manager] told them, ‘Look, the band isn’t in the right headspace.’” Eventually, however, the film’s producer Swati Iyer Chawla reached out to management for an unrelated query and talk of doing a song for Do Aur Do Pyaar came up. Mehra says, “We said, ‘All right. Let’s just walk this path. Let’s just see what comes out of it.’”

Sarin adds, “They showed us some footage and I think we connected to it, and I think that is also very important to us when we do something, that it’s talking to us emotionally.” The song found its vocalist in Lucky Ali after it was finished. Thakur says their primary objective with the project was to first make sure they’d made a song that did justice to the movie’s narrative. “Then the question came of, ‘We must find the best collab possible for a vibe like this,’” Thakur adds. Mehra recalls getting on Zoom calls with Ali at first and then heading down to Bengaluru to record with him in person. The bassist calls it a very comfortable experience.

The band members speak in an excited tone when talking about getting to work with Ali, a beloved pop voice for anyone who grew up in the late Nineties and early 2000s. Sarin adds, “It’s like we knew him. We used to travel to Delhi a lot from Chandigarh and we used to listen to him on the way, his music.” Deservedly, one of India’s most popular Hindi rock bands of the 2010s getting to work with Ali is hailed as a full circle moment by Sarin. Thakur adds, “He [Ali] was one of the benchmarks of how you do music when it’s not for a film because very few references existed for that in India.”

The release of “Tu Hai Kahaan” comes at a point where The Local Train is ready for more activity in 2024. They remain carefully unspecific about their plans but promise that everything will be revealed in due time. “It [the song release] segues really nicely into what we’re about to do next,” Thakur says. Mehra explains the momentum has certainly picked up in the last few months. “We have a lot of excitement to share in the next few months. I can put it like that,” the bassist says.

Mehra says all the finer details about “who else we’re going to be working with” and whether at all they will work with “other people” or not will be addressed as well. “I think we’ll keep dropping hints as we keep moving along, but the only thing that we’d like to tell people is that we will continue doing what we’ve been doing for the last decade or more, and they can keep expecting more and more stuff from us,” he adds.