Mazhai Varum... from Veppam

Yet another warm song from Joshua Shridhar and Na Muthukumar! It has a simple and steady BGM flowing through the entire song with the violin, flute, and cello interludes adding strength. Suzanne D'Mello does her part well in creating an unrequited-love-song feel to it. A lady love's unrequited love song is of course extra-special! Suzzane's version has a mix of solitude, passion, fervency, and longing. I did understand that it is a mellowed-down voice that is singing Mazhai Varum and her voice might sound great for a power-packed song. All these were what I had with me, to write, until I Google-ed her out. After that, it was surprises all the way...

What I did not know was that she is the voice behind Latika's theme and Dreams on fire from Slumdog Millionaire, Hosanna from Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa, and to my greatest surprise, Nalamdhaana from Silambattam. All these were surprises because, I have listened to each more than a thousand times; yet I could not get to appreciate her all these while. Each of these songs has a completely different genre and she has such grace in her voice in softer songs and power in the rest. But then, the inconsistency in the song credits makes an impression that they are all different people all together. The various names that appear in the credits are Suzie Q, Suzzane, and Suzzane D'Mello. Of course, she has a huge list of hit songs under the Bollywood category.

And for a singer of non-native tongue, her pronunciation of Tamil, in this song, is good. Her strengths are certainly the nuances she brings to the song and her humming just takes the song to a different plane. At the places where she goes too deeply husky, it gives the exact feel for Mazhai Varum. In this song, she supresses her popular RnB tones, and does a casual and light singing and that makes her voice sound a lot sweeter and younger. Something like how Suchitra sounded when she sang Tharai Erangiya from Eeram. Talking about Tharai Erangiya song, it was another song that I fell in love with instantly, for its simplicity, innocence, and sweetness. Anyways, I wanted to talk about just the Mazhai Varum song, giving due credits to each; but the realization of Suzzane's identity digressed the intent of this post!