Hardcore fans who have followed you from your first album and are the first to listen to each fresh work, say that when it comes to your film music, they get the feeling that you are increasingly painting by numbers. They say that in your latter film compositions, you are not all there. Because of your mastery over the craft, you can still come up with superb compositions but that earlier playfulness, where you would plant a little sound as a teaser for the senses, is increasingly missing. Is that an assessment you would agree with?
I would say that I have moved on from formulas. Sometimes, when people define me as something, I move on from it. If you have favourite modes of expression, then people will say your music has a sameness to it. The point is not to have a favourite way of expressing, of composing -- the point is that the song, the composition, needs to have a heart, and I am always searching for that heart. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you don't. But always, you search for it.
You never know where it is, till you start composing and refining, and at times, I surprise myself with what I discover and where I discover it. Also, the journey has become more broad-based; for instance, where earlier you looked to express yourself in music. It has now gone on to become a thought, a feeling, so many other things that you are trying to convey, and not just the music itself. For instance, Pray For Me Brother, which became completely different -- for me it was a success because, you know, the first time in English, an attempt to express a thought in a different musical idiom, all of that.
So your goals are no longer about delivering the next hit album...
No. Actually, it is in a way, because you want people who listen to your songs to get what you are trying to say, and when they do, then the album becomes a hit. But that is like a by-product, the hit album is not the foremost goal.
Sometimes it happens that way too. If you take Sivaji, it was fruitful as a team effort -- not just the compositions, but the way they were shot, the movements, the way it came out on screen, and that total package was successful and I was part of it and I loved doing that.
At this point in your career, do you have some major goal you are working towards, a solid sense of what you want to do next?
Maybe it is the company that I have started, K M Music. My film music won't be on it; this label will be dedicated to putting out alternative forms of music, the kind of compositions I don't have the freedom to create when working on films. This could be my new inspiration, my goal and my direction all at once, it all depends on how successful it is. It also depends on what fresh thoughts, and directions, come to you as you move forward.
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