“Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they’re doing now.”

Musicians and artists are not… it’s not like politicians or something where you can’t really affect them.

I think the younger kids need to realize there’s this whole forgotten 90s that people don’t really talk about.

I like my solitude, and I’m a strong-willed person; I’m a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

I’m not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever – which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you’ll have to ask him about that.

I don’t have anything to prove.

You’re always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that’s maybe even too weird for your own taste.

Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you’re just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don’t even remember what day it was.

I was only in the public eye because I was annoying. You know how neurotic people may ask for one thing when they may really want another thing? It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn’t really want attention.

I’m glad to play for them. But I’d rather play for an audience where half of them were not into it than one where all of them were pretending to be into it, for fear of being uncultured.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to paint, too. I’d like to try everything, but music is my reason for living.

And then you realize that your friends – your real-life friends – it’s not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you’re doing than how you’re doing.

It’s just different today. Nobody seems to last too long these days. I wouldn’t know how to get started today.

I don’t have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it’s really awful.

Unlike the rest of everyone I hang around with, I don’t drink, so I remember what happened after shows. And I have never hit on anyone after a show, I’m not that kind of person. Even if I was attracted to someone, I’d be too shy.

Talk to Arto Lindsay and I’m sure he’s tired of people asking him about DNA; he’s probably really into what he’s doing now, which is good stuff.

There’s not like this separate caste system where it’s like, “I’m the musician, you’re the audience. Never the two shall meet.” It was a case where it was like, “Hey, you know what? I’m on your level, man.”

Being known for musicals is a great thing.

Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we’re one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

I’m an ‘evolve or die’ kind of a musician. I think it’s cool to try new things.

For some musicians it becomes self-reflexive to think, “I have to write some of my kind of songs now.”

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.