W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.