Indian singer Shreya Ghoshal is excited for her upcoming gig in Dubai, and she says it’s because of the audience she’s expecting at the show. “It’s been a while since I came to Dubai for a public concert. And every time I come here, there’s a lot of excitement. There’s a lot of energy, because the Dubai crowd is very musical, very energetic,” she explains.
Ghoshal, who will belt out numbers such as Agar Tum Mil Jao on September 21 at Trade Center Arena, adds that since her last concert in Dubai, she’s accumulated a number of songs that she’d like to share with her fans. “There is a lot of magic in this particular tour; from our set list to our designs, everything about it is an experience which I’m sure that audiences will love,” she says.
She adds that she’ll be singing songs such as Deewani Mastani from the movie Bajirao Mastani, some indie tunes and some South Indian numbers. “So it’s a mixed bag of lot of different emotions and different kinds of songs. People will laugh, people will sing, people will cry, people will dance. That’s the idea,” she tells City Times.
The show has been a year in the making, says Ghoshal. “It started with our first US tour, which we did in 2023 and we added cities, and people were really excited about the show, so we kept adding more cities to it. We have conceptualised the routine, but we keep making changes to it. There are some additions, sometimes song lists change with the city and audience we are playing for. It’s a very dynamic set, and we are excited about what’s coming up next in Dubai. We are making sure that our songs are from the best selection.”
Ghoshal is a talented singer who first made the world sit up and take notice of her powerful vocals at the tender age of 16 when she took won the Indian reality TV show Sa Re Ga Ma. She had been training since she was six for the stage. “I started singing like as a baby. When I was three, four years old, I started singing properly, but that was only fun and play. Nobody knew that it will turn into a profession and music comes to me naturally. Music is my first love. It is the most soothing thing for me. It is a way of expression for me. It’s involuntary, like breathing,” she laughs.
She has sung in a multitude of languages since then, even if she doesn’t understand the nuances of the lyrics. “When I record these songs, of course, the process is to really learn what the song is all about. And most of them are from films. So the director or the composer comes and narrates the situation and tells me what the song is about. And once I get an overall feel, it’s okay. Once you know the overall emotion, music, I think, has no language. Music has its own language, which really, once you get the conversation, you understand what the tune is, what the speed of the overall speed of the character or the song situation is, then you don’t think to much about it.”
Tickets to see the show start at Dh150 and are available at platinumlist.net.