Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

The soundtrack to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was released in July 1995 on His Master's Voice, three months before Aditya Chopra's debut film reached cinemas on 20 October 1995. Jatin Pandit and Lalit Pandit, working as Jatin-Lalit, composed the music; Anand Bakshi wrote the lyrics. The pair turned out seven songs in roughly four months, and the sessions drew on a pool of singers that Hindi film music had come to rely on: Udit Narayan, Lata Mangeshkar, Kumar Sanu, Alka Yagnik, Abhijeet and Suresh Wadkar.

Two strains run through the record. One is Punjabi folk, audible in the wedding-song numbers and in the percussion that carries them. The other is the orchestral pop ballad, arranged around flute, tabla and sustained string sections. The decision to favour live-sounding instruments over the synthesizer gloss then spreading through mid-1990s Hindi film music gave the album a warmer texture than most of its contemporaries. Narayan and Mangeshkar share the title track; Sanu and Yagnik take the principal ballads.

Commercially the album was the best-selling Hindi film soundtrack of 1995. It earned two Filmfare Awards from five nominations. The film it accompanies went on to become the longest-running film in Indian cinema history, a distinction still attached to the 1995 release, though that record belongs to the picture rather than the record. [edit]