“I’ve always been interested in fashion, and Urban Outfitters presented me with a huge opportunity to pursue that interest.”

I’m working all the time. When I’m home I try to split my time evenly between resting and preparing for another tour, and writing stuff.

I’d love to have a shoe line, or a sunglasses line, or a purse line. Who am I kidding, I’d like to have an everything line!

Making music can sometimes make me a bit restless, so it’s fun when I get to be expressive in another way.

Advice I would give to anyone trying to find their own personal style: don’t copy anybody, just be yourself, and make your own trends.

My favorite record of all time is Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. It’s made up of a bunch of songs that don’t really sound the same, but they all go really well together.

It’s scary when you get to a point where you write these songs that people like, and then you think, “Am I ever going to be able to write something better than that?”

I love clothes so much, I always have. It’s awesome to have designers invite me to their shows and openings and send me samples of their work.

As artists and creative people it’s such an important time to be expressive and be empowering and supportive of people. It is a time where I feel like everyone has to be together and say, “Hey, we’re all going to be okay. We just need to work together.”

I was never really that great at sewing, but I had a good idea of what I wanted things to look like.

I don’t really pay too much attention to designers, I know what I like and I just try to find it, and I always try to find a cheaper deal because I have a tendency to be a cheapskate sometimes.

I don’t think lyrics need to be deep – just write whatever comes out of you. You don’t need to find intense meaning in everything.

I buy most of my clothes online, I just sit around and look at websites and say ‘oh that looks cute’ – and then I just buy it and hopefully it fits because buying stuff online is always sort of risky.

I went to school for a short period of time to study fashion. I wanted to become a stylist or a designer. I made clothes when I was a teenager that I used to sell online. My label name was “Baby Jesus” – so incredibly stupid, but whatever, I was 17!

I like the 50s, party-movie aesthetic of the beach. I’m not really into modern-day beach.

I think what we do is really, at times, a complicated thing. But at the end of the day it’s so important that we make art for people that need to escape reality for a second. That’s what music has always been for me. It’s been a way to tap out of what’s going on in my personal life.

There are days where I turn on the TV or I look at the news and I’m like, “I want to go to Mars. This is insane.” But I can’t go to Mars! I need to face reality and just to have some hope.

Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living.

It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers

Yes,” Howie said solemnly. “I can teach you how to be more ‘street’”. “For God’s sake…” “Or is it ‘urban’? I can’t remember. Anyway, I can teach you, grasshopper. Or hip-hopper.

I love business. I love helping urban communities grow. I love putting people to work of color. I love making sure – like right now the whole mortgage crisis, I want to help people get back into their homes.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

I think there’s no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border.