In an ideal world

Fox in the Garden plays a gig in Pune. Pic/Sofar Sounds

You don't need much to make a love song sometimes. All you have to do is let the strings of your heart form their own tune about the person you have fallen for. And you swim into the lake of your emotions where, from the depths of your deepest affection, words float up to the surface and reveal the lyrics. After that, you simply assemble the pieces of a musical jigsaw puzzle.

The keyboard adds the joy of feeling a flush on your face. The drums add the heartbeat. The bass line adds the steady pace of time passing by while walking hand-in-hand. And when it kicks in, the guitar lets you go crazy, like you felt the first time that you mustered up all the courage in the world to propose, and the person said, "Yes."

That's the feeling we get when listening to Forever beautiful, a standout track from the bag of a five-piece, city-based alt-rock act called Fox in the Garden, who will play their debut gig in Mumbai this evening. It's a song where a boy sings about a girl he hasn't met yet, but whose love he is already celebrating with unbridled happiness. The music forms the soundtrack for this eventual union. It's uplifting, because the notes here don't reflect the hollow emptiness of a heart that's been spurned. They seem, instead, to be about floating mid-air with a big fat smile on your face.

But this dreamy notion that we, as the listener, form about Forever beautiful pops like a bubblegum on our face when Soutrik Chakraborty, the band's songwriter, reveals that the track started off with a joke.

"Sid [bassist Siddhant Vetekar] and I were laughing about how back in the day, arranged marriages meant your grandmother pointing at a girl and saying things like, 'Oh, woh kitni soni kudi hai.' So that's where the idea came from. In the final story, there is indeed someone who is yearning for a person who is forever forgiving, forever beautiful. But even though I don't know if the word here is 'satire' or not, the song kind of is one. Such idealism doesn't exist actually. That's the thing," he says, adding a grey layer to a reading of the piece. But truth be told, we will stick to the feelings we had when we first heard the track, tucked inside an idealist bubble that can't be pricked.

ON: Tonight, 8.30 pm
AT: Hard Rock Cafe, Wadia International Centre, Worli.
CALL: 7506055127

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