[Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business.... So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.

Imagination is a powerful deceiver.

I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira).

I'd been to Memphis before, but we stayed out of Memphis early on in the late 70s for obvious reasons. People were very sensitive about Elvis Presley, and my stage name obviously would be provocative to some people in that area at that time.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

And I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it.

I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.