Every act, every deed of justice and mercy and benevolence, makes heavenly music in Heaven.
I am songwriter. I do compose the music of songs that I write in Bengali. But I've never thought of composing for a film. That's a different art altogether.
Culturally, I remember listening to Salil Chowdhury's music for Malayalam films. Many Bengali actors have worked in our films, too.
My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.
I realized that it's all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba.
One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God... I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with... Well, again, when you're young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.
This person loves tangerines, This person loves raspberries - and my son won't even look at berries. Isn't that amazing? And so I have to apply that to music; otherwise, I would always hide in a hole because of all the people that don't like Coldplay.
I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.
Rock n' roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis - all them people.
I mean, I haven't been completely lacking in some enjoyment of Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly. But I just didn't pay attention to that period of music, obviously.
Education is my next big thing. When music and art were taken out of the schools, I went berserk!
In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off.
Besides makeup, my other passion is music.
I don't think I threw myself into music because I had the best intentions; it was because I was really angry.
The best part of making music, for me, is collaborating and working with new people and fresh sounds and all those things that gets people excited to continue in this business that we all love so much.
Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit 'MIA.' That's the best part of it.
We set up a beta site, a test site, with movie, music and book reviews. If you're reading them and you want to buy a book or a ticket for a movie that's reviewed on the site, you can do that without leaving our site.
Music was your real passion, this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job - this thing that was highly visible, this thing that became about commerce - that's when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a hurricane.
