I've been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I've learned to resist that.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?