The Golden Age
We had one radio in my house when I was a kid. It was a squat, heavy, wood-paneled box with one big, stainless steel knob on the front. I loved spinning the knob so I could watch the needle coast slowly across the frequencies on the panel, which was pale blue when the radio was off; it glowed yellow when powered on.
The radio lived in our guest room. It didn’t get much use during the week, but on Sunday mornings, my family would listen to 1330 AM for a local Massachusetts program called “Sounds of India.” The host, Harish Dang, was a financial advisor on most days, but on Sundays, he was a DJ, playing Bollywood songs from films of every decade. He was famous in the Indian community throughout the Boston suburbs. "Sounds of India" is the only show I can remember my dad regularly tuning into, besides the six o’clock news on TV. My family would all pad around the house, doing our regular Sunday morning chores as the radio played. My father would blast the volume so we could hear it in the other rooms. My mom knew all the words to all the songs, and she would sing along.
My friend Sam Valenti, who founded the outstanding record label Ghostly International, also has a newsletter called Herb Sundays. You should subscribe. Sam asks music fans from in and around his world to contribute a Sunday playlist, without overthinking it. (A "herb" is slang for an uncool person, and if you didn’t know that, you, too, may be a herb.) The idea for his series is to make a mix without trying to flex. So when Sam asked me for a Sunday playlist based on my first instinct, I thought of the songs that formed the soundtrack of my childhood.
Here’s the playlist I put together, on Apple Music, and on Spotify, and here’s the accompanying note that I sent to Sam:
“Making this mix put me deep into my memories. When I was growing up, my parents played Hindi songs on Sunday mornings until the afternoons. My favorites were the ones from the 1960s, the end of the Golden Age of Bollywood. I haven’t seen most of the movies that these songs come from, and I can’t even speak Hindi, but I love these songs deeply and they’ve been an enormous influence on me. I feel something generational when I listen to the beautiful, intricate voices of Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar, and the warm, familiar, sweet voices of Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar. There was a time in my childhood when I hadn’t yet gotten to know one of my uncles, my mother’s youngest brother, but from stories I heard about him, I sometimes imagined him having Mohammed Rafi’s voice. The smile you can hear when he sings.
When I was in college, and didn’t have the experience of hearing these songs through my parents’ listening habits, I asked any relatives visiting from India to bring me CD compilations of songs from the 60s. India loves making compilations! So I had CDs like “Golden Duets of Asha Bhosle” and “Mohammed Rafi - Timeless Classics.” I’ve lost track of those CDs, but this mixtape is my way of recreating some version of them.
I’m not sure if any of your other subscribers besides me are going to want an hour and forty-five minutes of tape-saturated, extravagantly arranged numbers from Indian musicals, but thanks for giving me a reason to put these together.”
You can read what Sam wrote about the playlist in his newsletter here. I spent last Sunday morning listening back to the mix, and I hope to listen again this Sunday, and the Sundays that follow.
In other news:
I interviewed Madonna for an episode of Song Exploder!
There’s a new episode of Book Exploder with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham. He discusses his book The Hours with Susan Orlean.
There’s also a new episode of Canción Exploder with Silvana Estrada.
The tour dates for “An Evening with Hrishikesh Hirway and Jenny Owen Youngs” include some shows in October in the midwest. If you like this newsletter, I think you’ll also like the concert. Come listen to us tell some stories and play our songs:
Wednesday, October 26 - Chicago, IL - Sleeping Village - tickets
Thursday, October 27 - Iowa City, IA - Englert Theatre - tickets
Friday, October 28 - St. Paul, MN - Amsterdam Bar and Hall - tickets
Thanks,
Hrishikesh
The cover to my Herb Sundays mixtape, by Cina.