Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it

Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

Schools are for training people how to listen to other people.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.