INTERVIEW | National Award-winning Composer Vipin Mishra Still Wants To Make Music On His Own Terms
Between forming a new band, his new EP, podcast, record label and scoring for films and ads, DIY musician Vipin Mishra has his hands full.
Published : September 1, 2026 at 3:53 PM IST
Repetition is musician Vipin Mishra's enemy. This habit is useful if you are a musician, slightly inconvenient if you are a fan, and possibly the reason Vipin has spent three decades moving between rock bands, film scores, independent music, documentaries, podcasts and setting up record label. He has been making music professionally since the mid-1990s, when he joined Parikrama, one of the bands that helped establish the Indian independent rock circuit. He was part of the Delhi band's original lineup for roughly a decade.
From Parikrama To Scores And Awards
Since then, his musical life has expanded considerably. There have been Bollywood film scores, television, advertising, studio work, live performances, a National Award for Best Music Direction, documentaries, a record label called Kranti Records, and now a podcast in which he talks to the musicians he has known for years. There is also a new band, new independent music, and a new EP Bejawab.
Hum Aur Tum serves as the lead single ahead of his next upcoming release scheduled for September 2026. Blending the sonic weight of classic rock with the raw vulnerability of alt-rock, Hum Aur Tum is an intense reflection on global conflict, systemic violence and human division. Conceptualized as a modern tribute to Pink Floyd’s iconic Us And Them, the track poses a haunting question: How long will our hate bleed us dry? The song originated one evening when Mishra was jamming with industry veteran Indrajit 'Tubby' Sharma.
He Does It His Way
Mishra is not, it appears, short of things to do. “I am doing everything simultaneously,” he says. “It's not an either-or for me.” That might be the simplest way of understanding his career. Mishra doesn't seem particularly interested in choosing between the different versions of himself. Film composer and indie musician, guitarist and producer, documentary maker and podcaster. He would rather have several doors open than spend too much time deciding which one is the official entrance.
The independent music of Vipin Mishra Project has existed for years, although he describes it as something that initially came out of passion rather than career planning. Commissioned music, after all, comes with instructions. A film already has a story. An advertisement already has a product. A television show already has an audience and a mood that somebody, somewhere, has probably described in a pitch deck.
“You're fulfilling somebody else's dreams,” Mishra says. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, he enjoys it. But songwriting offers a different kind of freedom. “As an artist and a songwriter, you've got a bunch of things to say,” he says. So he created a separate identity for that music: the Vipin Mishra Project. For the past eight years, he has been producing, recording and releasing songs under that name. His commercial work belongs to someone else's narrative. His independent work belongs to his own. Then there is the slightly inconvenient fact that Mishra gets bored. “I am a restless guy,” he says. “I don't like to become comfortable and then keep repeating that process. Repetition bores me.”
Mishra's move into film and television gave him precisely the kind of new problems he seems to enjoy, especially original scores. He has worked with production houses including Yash Raj Films and Vijeyta Films, as well as Netflix, and his work has moved beyond songs into the less visible but often more demanding business of scoring a film.
There is a misconception that a film score is something you can throw together once the edit is locked. Mishra strongly disagrees. “You can't score a great score for a two-hour, two-and-a-half-hour film in four weeks,” he says. “It doesn't work. You have to give it three months.”
There are musicians, violins, violas, cellos, written parts, conductors, arrangements. There is, in other words, actual music involved. The best scores change how you experience a scene. They tell you that something is wrong before the character knows it. They make a landscape feel lonely, a room feel threatening or an otherwise ordinary conversation suddenly feel like the beginning of the end. For someone like Mishra, who has lived in both the worlds of rock performance and cinematic composition, perhaps the attraction is obvious: a new vocabulary every time.
The DIY Challenge
Mishra also has a fairly old-fashioned belief in knowing how things work. He edits his own videos. He taught himself to play guitar, and the software to compose. He has produced his own music, played keyboards, mixed and mastered some of his recordings, and made Road To Zanskar, a documentary series born partly from his love of motorcycles and storytelling.
“I believe in the DIY ethic completely,” he says. The important part, according to him, isn't necessarily doing everything yourself forever. It's understanding what you want before you ask somebody else to do it. “You should know what you want, and then you get to tell other people what you want. That's the difference.”
This philosophy extends naturally into his music. He doesn't insist on mixing and mastering everything himself. Sometimes another pair of ears is exactly what a song needs. But sometimes he knows, while producing the track, that he wants to stay with it until the very end. His latest independent work falls into that category. He has written, produced, mixed and mastered it himself. The result is music that exists outside the increasingly crowded machinery of commissioned work.
Streaming Platforms Aren't Music Stores
Mishra has a slightly provocative theory about streaming. He thinks we may be approaching the end of the DSP (digital service provider) era. Not because artists dislike Spotify, but because he thinks listeners who genuinely care about music are also becoming frustrated by the way streaming platforms organise what they hear.
"The problem," he argues, "is the playlist." Or rather, the fact that the playlist has become the place where songs go to become interchangeable. Mishra remembers a different relationship with music. You bought an album. You listened to it. You got to know the artist. You knew the sequencing. You lived with the record. Today, you might hear a song on a playlist, like it, and then watch it disappear beneath the next recommendation. “The problem is you're hearing all of it through playlists,” he says. “Even if you like a song, you don't get that connection with the artist.”
His answer is not to complain about the system and then continue using it. He has decided that his future independent releases will not appear on DSPs first. Instead, he plans to release them through platforms such as Bandcamp, with the music potentially reaching streaming platforms six months or a year later.
The reasoning is simple. He wants to know who his listeners are. If 50 people in Hyderabad buy his music and give him their email addresses, those 50 people become considerably more useful to him than an abstract number showing 50,000 streams. If he eventually plays in Hyderabad, he knows there are people there who actually care. “That gives you the ability to connect with your fans,” he says.
There is also another thing streaming has taken away: ownership. Buy a CD, vinyl record or tape and you have something. Delete the streaming service and the playlist disappears. Mishra wants his listeners to be able to purchase lossless, uncompressed versions of his music. It is not simply audiophile fussiness. It is a different philosophy of consumption. “This is high time we move away from this one-size-fits-all kind of a model,” he says. This is where his argument becomes less about Spotify and more about community. He doesn't want millions of anonymous listeners. He wants the right listeners.
The Audience He Actually Wants
Mishra isn't particularly impressed by the follower count. This is probably an inconvenient position for a musician in 2026, when follower counts can look suspiciously like résumés. But his argument is straightforward: why should every artist compete in the same marketplace? The audience for Diljit Dosanjh is not necessarily the audience for the Vipin Mishra Project. There may be overlap. There may be people who happily listen to both but the two artists don't need to behave as though they are selling the same product. “The bulk of people are doing is not important anymore,” Mishra says. “What is important is for you to have your community.”
His podcast comes from the same impulse. Mishra has started talking to musicians he has known for decades: Subir Malik of Parikrama, Palash Sen of Euphoria, with Indian Ocean's Rahul Ram next on the list. The conversations are not really nostalgia exercises. They are attempts to document what happened when musicians tried to build careers in non-film music in India, often before there was a functioning ecosystem to support them.
“When we meet, we talk about music, we play and that's pretty much it,” Mishra says. “I had not really gotten to know their journey.” After three decades, he is curious about those journeys. It is also, he believes, useful information for younger musicians trying to build careers outside Bollywood. These are people who have spent 30 or more years figuring out what works, what doesn't, and what it takes to survive.
In an industry that is forever obsessed with the next big thing, Mishra is interested in asking the older question: How did you stay?
A Song A Month
Then there is the new band. Mishra has put together a fixed lineup with bassist Manas Chaudhary, an old friend who has played on many of his recordings, and drummer Sidd Coutto, whom Mishra has known since the Zero days. He doesn't want a rotating collection of musicians assembled for individual gigs. “I don't want it to be a floating band,” he says. “I want it to be the old-school band in which we are a fixed lineup.”
He plays guitar and sings. They are now looking for a keyboard player. There is also an EP: four songs already recorded and mastered, with the possibility of a fifth. His plan is to release one song a month.
Mishra has been a professional musician since 1995. He has been in one of India's foundational rock bands, worked in films and television, made documentaries, released independent music, started a label, created a podcast and built yet another band. And still, the most revealing thing he says is that he doesn't like repetition. There is something very rock'n'roll about that.
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