Musicians always want to sacrifice our creativity to get involved in environmental issues or political activism of some sort - to reduce it to something more populist in terms of sing-alongs or guitar songs with a message.

All these emotions are coming from one thing - sound. It's not coming from your experiences in life, your childhood. It's related to those things, but it's being triggered by the sound.

When you're listening to music, you listen to it with a friend one day and it sounds one way. You listen to it with another friend the next day, and it sounds a little different. Sometimes the greatest pleasure of listening is not the music that you're listening to; it's the person that you're listening to it with.

In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof."

Our individual consciousness is actually part of a larger system. There are many levels of consciousness, and the creativity used in composing the music comes from another level that is not purely personal.

Musicians always want to sacrifice our creativity to get involved in environmental issues or political activism of some sort - to reduce it to something more populist in terms of sing-alongs or guitar songs with a message.

I don't like to treat words and sounds like objects. You have to penetrate deeply into their meaning.