Singer-songwriter Raj Goon and his team seem to have put a hell of a lot of effort into the video for his new single ‘Maa’, and it shows. The cinematography is excellent and so is the direction. But it’s all about the music, of course, and well, the single does exactly what it says on the tin. Raj has a strong voice, some good songwriting chops and chooses to highlight the subject matter here more than getting into a bunch of musical rabbit holes. ‘Maa’ is simple, it’s about mothers, and that’s what is important.

That being said, there isn’t too much going on with the track itself. It’s just a sugary sweet indie tune with the main players being his vocal, a couple layers of acoustic guitar and sporadic sections of percussion. There are two sides to having such an obsessively skeletal presentation. This very wide open mix with largely nothing but a bunch of space in it does sometimes seem to want some filling in, and the moments when it does bring in pretty much anything else (like some bass, a backing vocal here, an extra layer of guitar there), things go over much better. Of course, the other side is that keeping things so overtly simple keeps the focus on what he is saying. And that it does. When Raj is singing about the most important person in our lives, pretty much, the one thing you can’t argue is that he does capture the essence of doing a dedication to mothers and motherhood. He truly feels these things, and that particular sense of honesty, genuine feeling and love is plainly displayed for all to see. From that point of view, it seems a bit superfluous discussing the musicality of a song like ‘Maa’. Yeah, it’s just an acoustic track with a couple small bits of interest, but it’s the words that matter. And Raj has many of them.