Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and the specific sound of 2003

There is a stretch either side of 2003 where a Hindi film song announces its arranger before its singer. The tell is the middle of the mix: real strings rather than a patch, a massed vocal used as a pad instead of a hook, and a rhythm section that keeps moving during the parts where an older arrangement would have paused for breath.

Maahi Ve is the textbook case. It is a wedding song, so the obvious move is dhol and a straight melody. Instead the arrangement passes the tune between four voices and keeps the harmony shifting under them, which is why it survives repeat listening at an actual wedding better than the songs written to sound like weddings.

Pretty Woman, from the same film, shows the other half of the method: Shankar Mahadevan singing something that is technically difficult and making it sound like enthusiasm rather than effort. He had already proved the point five years earlier on Breathless, a song whose entire premise is a held phrase, and which is still the thing people ask him to do.

What dates this era is not the instrumentation. It is the confidence that a listener will sit through an arrangement that takes forty seconds to arrive.