I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

It's hard to avoid the past but one goes forward.

As an artist, I move along in my life, into whatever things I'm doing, and I hear things where it's like, "Oh, that'd be a great [song] title! I'll use that!" So I keep a running list of titles on my computer. I've got these words and phrases that just sustained my interest. So I'm a step ahead, really, with the titling!

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

Commercial record has never interested me. It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.

I don't like playing standards. I like to do my own cutting edge work.

There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.