The interview which appears below was originally published in Nasreen Munni Kabir's book, A.R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
NMK: Despite all the great praise that’s showered on you, do you suffer from self-doubt?
ARR: I’ve tried to develop a kind of balance over the years — whether people praise my work or rip it apart. I trust the possibility that a few months later they may like it. When people go overboard in their praise, I usually think the music is probably overrated. An artist needs to develop a sense of balance. Otherwise you can get really depressed or believe a bit too much in the hype and flattery. It’s hard for a musician. You have to hold back your emotions, control them and at the same time let them come through the music.
NMK: Who is your best critic? Is there someone whose opinion you value?
ARR: The Net is a great tool to get instant feedback on your work. The fans and those who hate me never fail to let me know what they think.
NMK: It’s so instant now, the love and the hate. You’ve worked in over a hundred movies, is composing film scores still a big challenge?
ARR: There’s great pressure. Sometimes I have sleepless nights — most of the time I work at nights because I’m not disturbed, so there’s no sleep anyway [smiles] — but you know what I mean. The main difficulty is switching sensibilities. You need to be right on that. What Mumbai filmmakers want isn’t the same as the needs of Tamil filmmakers. When I work in London or Los Angeles, it’s different again. What works here doesn’t work there.
But composing is a real blessing, and especially creating music for non-film albums. You don’t often get the chance in cinema to write a beautiful piece of music that lasts for ten minutes. A scene may only require a track for thirty seconds and then they’re going to cut the music at the point they need to. That said, film music is what I’ve chosen to do and it’s what I’m doing now. I try and compose outside of films too. It probably helps to bring out my expression rather than it being trapped in a single framework. But then many of the film compositions have my expression too.
NMK: I suppose if you only do film music, it’s always telling someone else’s story.
ARR: Yeah, exactly. [laughs]
NMK: Your work takes you all around the world. One day you’re in Chennai, and the next day you could be in Prague, Paris or London. Where is home for you?
ARR: It’s strange. But whenever I dream of home, I see the old Habibullah Road house where I grew up — the house where the roof leaked. [smiles] I never dream about the place we live in now, even though it’s been our home since 1987. It’s very hard to explain why this happens. [long pause] I do miss my family when I’m away. I try and return home for a few weeks and then go back to London or Los Angeles or wherever.
When the film Roja became a big hit in North India, I had considered moving to Mumbai because I was offered so many Hindi films. Just when I seriously thought of moving to Mumbai, I had to be in London, so I moved there for Bombay Dreams. And when I thought I’d get a place in London, Bombay Dreams opened on Broadway. So I decided it’s best to stay in Chennai and travel from here. There’s no point in moving base from one place to another. So I travel when I need to. Just as long you can stay mentally clear where home is. That’s the main thing.
NMK: You’ve composed music for some films that have sunk without a trace. How do you deal with that?
ARR: It’s disappointing when a film doesn’t do well. But the audience has the right to reject the films they don’t like. From my perspective, it was thanks to that film, and the ideas it gave me that I wrote the music in the first place. I always respect a film for what it is, whether it succeeds or fails at the box-office. The very process of creating songs and a background score is a gratifying experience for me. Even bad movies have good intentions. No one sets out to make a bad film.
Dil Se was a good film and many thought the songs were the most memorable songs of the nineties. But do you remember how it was panned in India when the film was released in 1998? I was in Hollywood last year and a woman came up to me and said she had watched Dil Se nineteen times! In an interview, Andrew Lloyd Webber said he happened to see “Chhaiyan Chhaiyan” on Channel 4 TV in the UK one day, and it inspired him to talk to Shekhar Kapur and finally produce Bombay Dreams.
If you think in terms of success and failure, you can end up becoming too careful and lose the joy of creating music. You must be careful not to lose a kind of innocence when writing music. You can become self-critical and shy away from simplicity. I guess that hasn’t happened to me yet.
NMK: But how do you accept the rejection of music that you were passionate about? Isn’t it heartbreaking?
ARR: There’s an interesting lesson we can learn from the Bhagwad Gita, which tells us to do our duty without thinking what we will get in return. There is also a story about Michelangelo that deeply impressed me. He was painting a fresco at the back of a chapel and was asked why he was painting in a place where no one could see his work. Michelangelo answered that he did not seek people’s appreciation but the appreciation of God.
I find both ways of thinking very inspiring because the joy of creating is in itself so satisfying. I also think the poetic environment that artists of all kinds bring to people has great value. We composers shouldn’t waste precious time. We have a limited life span and the more chances we’re given to compose good tunes, the better it is for us. Ultimately any pretext for composing music is a good pretext.
I have always been totally apolitical and perhaps naively still believe that the power of music can unify the world. The other thing that’s important to me is that people understand I never set out to disappoint or offend anyone. Even here, talking with you, I hope nothing I have said causes offence or hurt because that is far from my intention.
NMK: Your life is quite a roller-coaster ride, where do you see yourself in the next few years?
ARR: The KM Conservatory has taken two years of my life and I want to continue to put as much energy as I can into developing it, because the basic idea of KM is a great idea. I don’t really want to stick to a pattern in my musical journey. I don’t want to be categorised. But who knows? Maybe I’ll be farming in a few years. [smiles]
