Ilaiyaraaja's New Song 'Kanagamani' From 'Dorothy' Puts His Words in His Voice

Ilaiyaraaja, 83, wrote both the lyric and the tune of his new song, 'Kanagamani', from Karthik Subbaraj's Tamil film 'Dorothy'. Released on 10 October, 15 days into the film's run, it is the only one of the film's four singles with him as its sole credited singer. The other three came out before 'Dorothy' reached Indian cinemas on 25 September, after a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival: 'Kalyana Virundhu' on 22 August, 'Muthumani' a week later and 'Onna Thottu' the day before, with an 18-track score album in between.

'Kanagamani' was heard first in the cinema

For anyone who has seen the film, it is not new. Under the lyric video, at least six of the first day's 40 best-liked comments are about hearing it in the film or the theatre. The audio went up on Ilaiyaraaja's official channel at midnight India time on 10 October, and Sony Music South's lyric video followed at 6 pm. By 16:44 UTC that Saturday they had 100,155 and 59,833 views.

A hum, a chant, a cello and a music box

Our listening software split it into passages. A voice is humming by 5.8 seconds over a soft, ambient bed, and our sound classifier's first guesses are humming, lullaby and new-age music. The singing proper arrives at 0:31, the loudest passage so far at 0.67 on our scale of 0 to 1, and the classifier tags it chant and sad music. Then the voice stops. For 36 seconds from 0:52 there are no words: a cello, then a flute. The chant comes back at 1:28 for the loudest stretch of the song, 0.68, until 2:04. After it come bells, a glockenspiel and mallets that sound like a music box, from 2:10 to 2:49, one more sung passage, and an unaccompanied line that echoes away at 3:12.

'Kanagamani' is a quiet record. Through the same software, 'Muthumani', the film's 14.8-million-view duet, comes out as dance music, with disco, house and afrobeat tagged through most of its five minutes, and it runs about five decibels louder on average. Nothing in the new song is built for a phone speaker or a 15-second clip.

The 'Dorothy' singles before it

The three earlier 'Dorothy' singles set a high bar on YouTube: 27.6 million views for 'Kalyana Virundhu' in 49 days, 14.8 million for 'Muthumani' in 43 and 2.48 million for 'Onna Thottu' in 16. They came out before the film, when the songs were the main way to meet it. 'Kanagamani' arrives after, for people who already know where it falls in the story. A screen song's fortunes follow the story around it, which is also what our bet on Kwon Jin-ah's 'Another Day', from the drama 'Doctor X', depends on.

Can 'Kanagamani' catch 'Onna Thottu'?

Three things push 'Kanagamani' up: a film in its third week whose audiences have just heard the song inside it, a composer whose name alone moves numbers, and two official uploads that drew 160,000 views between them on day one. Three hold it back: no beat to dance to, nothing short to clip for Shorts, and a first full line that arrives only half a minute in.

We predict it gets there anyway: 2,482,084 views on the 'Kanagamani' lyric video by 31 October, where 'Onna Thottu' stood after 16 days.