Breathless (Shankar Mahadevan album)
2004 album by Shankar Mahadevan
Breathless is the 1998 debut Indi-pop studio album by Indian singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan with the tracks written by lyricist Javed Akhtar. It was the album that first made Shankar Mahadevan famous.
The title track "Breathless", is a steady stream of a song that goes on without a break, stanzas or verse. However, Shankar didn't sing in one continuous breath. The song's audibly unbroken flow is achieved through studio editing and clever manipulation of the recording. Shankar has confirmed that he recorded different sections of the song and then pieced them together in post-production. He revealed multiple times that it's a concept song in a raga with free improvisation. During the writing, Shankar gave a meter to Javed for writing the lyrics while catching the meter and Javed gave him four sheets of the lyrics which looked like a magazine article with which Shankar felt challenged.
The final track "Breathless (The Reprise)", is a similar song whose story takes off from where "Breathless" ended.
The album won the award for Best Non-film album at the 1998 Screen Awards.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4959927. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Breathless (Shankar Mahadevan album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.