I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed.
I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.
The performance of Carnatic music is multi-dimensional and layered. A performance is at once an artiste's cathartic process of personal exploration and an open energy exchange with the audience: a release and a conversation.
There's something about a catharsis that is very important.
I've always used songwriting as a way to help me organise reality.
As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.
I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.
To record an album is cathartic, or at least it was with 'Belus,' but to make music is more fulfilling than anything else, I think.
It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.
Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.
In some ways, in 'The Queen of the Night,' I'm writing about some of the experience that I had with 'Edinburgh' where I was entirely unable to speak about what had happened to me as a child, but I could read from the novel.
I don't know if I would call it therapy, but filmmaking is really the only thing I know how to do. For me, making movies is a way to bring on change for myself, and I really enjoy that part.
