You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

In modern studios, we're so used to becoming little dictators; you're used to the fascism of having complete control over every element.

Chaos is hateful. That indeterminate nature of war brings a really unsettling atmosphere to life.

As never before does the keeping of our economic machine in tune depend upon wise policies in the administrative side of the government.

Actually, time and time again people always come back to my early, more innocent stuff, and say, "I kind of prefer that." I could go back to writing that and probably make more people happy, but it just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I don't want to take the lazy route.

I read somewhere that if you translated all the gadgets and technology in our houses to make our lives easier and save time, each of us would have the equivalent of 300 slaves, in Roman times. We have these incredible luxuries, incredible power and privileges, but we seem to be squandering them on little plastic spoons to stir our coffee with, that'll last two seconds in our lives.

I think this market space, this modern world we're living in, one of its greatest failures is that it can only seem to describe a collective in terms of consumers or clients. It never sees an audience or a community as part of the process. And that's something I'm quite proud of, even if the music is crap.