On 'Love Letters' I focused exclusively on sung music, creating a collection of songs that directly address heartbreak and its ensuing emotions in a way that instrumental music can only hint at.
The sitar is a really difficult instrument to play. Physically it's taxing because of the cross-legged sitting position, the length of the neck on the shoulder, the thinness of the strings. There's a lot of pain, especially at the start.
I think we are all individuals at the end of the day. There's nothing about culture that can prescribe who you're meant to be.
In the last few years in particular, I've found that it's okay to let go of culture rather than hold on to it. And by letting go, you kind of realise that it's there anyway.
I live in the modern world, and I appreciate the most cutting-edge parts of it. But I also like to check out as much as I can.
I lived with my teacher and he was my father and he practiced every day so I practiced every day and we practiced every day together.
I do think evolution is an important aspect of keeping a tradition alive. If it freezes and remains very static in its form, it dies, and so a natural evolution has to occur.
Someone like my father will improvise as much as 90% of the music in concert, but with me it's maybe 10 to 20%. It's sort of the test of how great someone is, the more they can improvise correctly and still be true to the raga they're playing, and still keep it new and fresh the whole time.
I have been given something really, really special and really unique, and it is not just in and of itself having learned from my father, who is the greatest exponent of this musical style. But it is an oral tradition that is only generally passed on in that manner, and so without the people who continue to... learn it and perform it, it dies.
In a studio context, the music becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When you have collaboration, you have other people's strengths that I don't share, so my song can get stronger.
I love it that my father is such a classical musician and such a traditionalist, and at the same time has had a wild life and a crazy time.
I do feel a commitment to this art form and to my father's teaching, and I think the older I get I'm feeling that more and more strongly.
I do feel a commitment to this art form and to my father's teachings, and the older I am getting, the more I am feeling it.
I work in the music world in a kind of very multi-faceted way. I work around the world, in different genres.
Mum's home food was comfy, exquisite and she was also capable of the most wonderful gourmet food. She'd mix the rice and dal with stuff and roll these easy-to-pick-up extra-softened little balls of rice.
My memories of mealtimes are a real bleed of music and food. Music never really stopped in the music room, because everyone would move out to the table with their sitars.
George Harrison became my uncle - not by blood but through love. It's sort of an Indian cultural thing.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like 'Indian classical music' and 'ragas,' and all of that's new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating - one doesn't know where to begin sometimes.
Music is my passion, it's my fun - but what's really important are the people I build a family with. That comes first.
My parents were very unusual. They were pro-women and independence and they wanted me to have my own career. And because of my lineage, every door was opened for me.
