Not an outing, it was more like an adventure. It was strange in a way. I was listening to Evita, and that got me thinking about musicals, so I then listened to sound of music. It is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and then I read somewhere that it was first a stage play.

That got me thinking, about whether I could do that, whether I could compose for a stage play...

Is there a difference? Sure. On movies, everything is magnified. You sit in the theater, and your attention is captured by a huge screen in front of you, by images of the actor and actress against a romantic backdrop. And you listen to the romantic song picturized on them -- the fact that the images are so much larger than life arrests you attention, so it is easier to then capture you with the song. On stage, people are merely life-size, the effect is not as arresting, so it could be harder. Or at least, that is how I was thinking. And then about three weeks later I got Andrew's call, so I said yes. It was, for me, an adventure, a chance to experiment, to try something new.

But is it really new? The way we hear it, you will be using your own compositions, tunes you've scored for various films...

That was the original idea, to use my songs and bridge them with the musical score. But when we tried it out, we found that my existing tunes didn't translate too well into English. So then we scrapped that idea, and decided to write an entirely original body of music. The challenge here was to write 'English' tunes, but still evoke in the listener the ambience, the fee, of Bollywood, of Bombay's film industry. Now, we are only using two songs of mine -- and no, we haven't decided which ones it will be.

Overall, what was the experience like, working with Weber?

Amazing, it was like going back to school. He is a master of that form. I found I had to unlearn things that I had learnt, I had to dig deep and re-learn things I had forgotten. For instance, I always compose on Midi, unlike say Ilayaraja, I never write out my music by hand. I realized that when working with an orchestra, I had to change, I had to go back to writing music by hand, and that is a different experience, it changes how you compose. I think it came at the right time, for me, it was like getting a second wind, getting a new look at what I was doing.

Was it in a sense release from jail, freedom from doing film music?

Well, freedom is not always ideal. For instance you do news reports, if they ask you to do a short story out of the blue, is that freedom? It will be if you are confident that you have the skills to do it, but if you don't have that freedom, then something like that can have the reverse effect. Like I told you, it so happened that Weber's call came at the right time -- if he had called me four, five weeks earlier, I may not have been mentally ready for it, I may not have accepted.

Working with Weber, you said, taught you new things. Will your film music now reflect that change?

Look at Madonna, the album she released after Evita was different, she showed a new musicality.

Of course, it is different thing that she then went back to her earlier style, buy that is a different story. I don't know if I have changed and if my music will reflect that change -- I am still working on the Weber project, so it is too early to tell. But I hope so, certainly.

Was learning in your mind when you accepted the project?

Not necessarily, you learn all the time anyway. Like I remember going to Ladakh, I had just then bought a new videocam, so I was shooting away like a tourist and I came across this group of children singing, and I shot them.

Then back home, when replaying that tape, I listened to their singing, and realized that the chorus had an interesting sound, so I played with that, and ended up using what I learnt in Dil Se. Or for instance, I have this school near my home and every day I used to hear the children sing Vande Mataram, I learnt something from listening to them and that came in handy when I made my own version.

Also Read: Hariharan, an AR Rahman fan

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