‘Shape of You’ goes Carnatic one more time

The craze for Ed Sheeran’s 2017 record-breaking hit ‘Shape of You’ refuses to die down. Yet another Carnatic remix of the English single has surfaced on Instagram.

It’s actually a reel of 30 seconds, sung by Hrishi, a singer who hails from Tamil Nadu but is raised in Washington DC. His version has over five lakh views.

In terms of music structure, the original track by Sheeran is medium-paced and has a uniform rhythmic pattern, which makes it easy to improvise.

What is the secret to Sheeran’s success? A 2018 article published in ‘The Conversation’ sheds some light: The looping chord progression is Sheeran’s speciality and the melody in ‘Shape Of You’ uses a pentatonic scale, which means five musical notes. This is the most common scale across musical compositions.

Back to Hrishi’s version. He starts with the hook lines ‘I’m in love with the shape of you, we push and pull like a magnet do...’, singing it in Sheeran-style. He switches the gears halfway into the song, belting out swaras (sa ga ma pa ne) on the pentatonic scale and winds down with a quick rendering of the swaras as background music recedes.

Singers Vinod Krishnan and Aditya Rao of Indian Raga fame had given a similar Carnatic twist five years ago. Titled ‘Shape of You Indian Mix’ and composed by Mahesh Raghvan, it has accumulated over 11 million views on YouTube.

Ragas like Abheri and Shudha Dhanyasi, Konnakol, and alaaps can be heard in the song, which is set to Adi tala, the most popular beat in Carnatic music.

Spend some time on YouTube and you would even find a bhakti remix, done by singers Aks and Lakshmi from Los Angeles.

This version is brimming with chants like ‘Hari Narayan Om’, ‘Sri Krishna Govinda’ and ‘Keshava Madhava’ and instrumentation spans base drums, guitar riffs and a faint tabla sound.

Closer home in Bengaluru, parody rock band Live Banned has done what it is known for — It has written new lyrics and set it to the tune of ‘Shape of You’. It is funny, desi, and don’t miss the cool glasses they wear. The video has over one million views on YouTube.