“Music is real; it’s something you can touch and feel. It moves you – the bass literally shakes you and rocks you from the inside.”

I’ve made this decision not to talk to the press about anything that’s gone on in my life, but just to write music about it. They can interpret it themselves.

Whenever God restores something, He restores it to a place greater than it was before.

Music makes your soul feel amazing while you’re performing it. It’s not air, it’s not wind, it’s not anything like that. It’s solid. It’s thick. It’s like summertime in New York.

You never really want anything you can easily have.

I never had innocence.

I can’t change the world. I have to fix me.

I can tell you one thing, Iran is closer to developing nuclear weapons today than it was a week ago, or a month ago or a year ago. It’s just moving on with its efforts.

I think that the growing government control of the press is very clear. Turkey is still not a dictatorship, there is still some freedom of the press, but I think it’s moving in the wrong direction.

Each time a Palestinian or an Israeli dies, it is terrible. But they have the right to have a funeral, to be buried, to have a place in the memory of the survivors. And then you have these other places – Darfur, Rwanda.

I often play a move I know how to refute.

Even Colombia – where the dead have no faces and literally cannot be counted. Theirs are minuscule lives moving toward imperceptible deaths. For me, it is the essence of tragedy.

You need to have proper management if you’re going to move forward.

I’ve been back in New York a year and a half now. Before that I was on the West Coast for five years.

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.