I have gone through different phases in my music writing. There was a time when I used a little exercise — incorporating all of the twelve notes in the chromatic scale — to get me going. I used this technique for a while, but I don't any longer because I am going back to simpler melodies. Originally I moved away from the simple songs because I thought they were too simple.

You can give music variation without changing the notes. When you get close to a piece there will inevitable be tinkering. I sometimes wonder if concert pianists expend so much effort and energy finding new ways to interpret that what they really need is some more direct form of self-expression.

If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.

Very fine, but why do you put so many wrong notes in? Basically, it is all built on simple triads.

I know what it is to go over the same songs over and over again, and to try to make them perfect. It’s interesting and it’s hard and it’s difficult at the same time…You have to stay on top of things.

l'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn't play it. ... I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.

I'm a writer who plays the piano. As I write, I find new things I like. I make them into what I call principles, and they become part of my playing vocabulary. That's the secret of what you get from composing. You get to discover things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Much like a speech pattern, your improvisation patterns can get stale if you don't keep building your vocabulary. Each time you re voice something, you change the sound. When you do this enough, you get used to those sounds, and they start to come out as you play. You end up using voicings that aren't common, which gives you an auditory identity.

What's good about the way we write songs is that I never quite know what I'm doing cause I can't read music. source

Going in and out of a song, you know you might just be good enough to improvise a little bit when you’re playing live when you haven’t recorded a song, but then you get a chord and you say, oh, that little bit that I’m playing there, that doesn’t fit quite right, you know, or there’s something missing in that chord. It’s like putting a microscope on the song, you know, and polishing it to the way that you wanted, that’s what I think. I think things like … there was one chord this time, and we’re using good guitars, but nothing sounded right. Slightly out of tune. As you move from the top of the neck to the bottom of the neck, you’d never have noticed it when you were playing live, but when you’re recording it it becomes so so intricate that I think it’s a great way to get into the song

I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales -- like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord -- because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance.

Music is the space between the notes.

There are notes between notes, you know.

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.

Shankar Mahadevan: There is a very thick line between being repetitive and having your own sound. You can always re-invent yourself - think about the sounds you are using. I don't see any reason why you have to be repetitive if you have enough knowledge, enough exposure.