When I met someone who I thought was really talented, I would just be like, Wow! How did you get that way? And I met a lot of people who would just do anything to claw their way to the top, and it was just shocking and awful for me to see that for the first time. And now I live in Manhattan so I have become desensitized to that.

You've got to deal with the world with all of its troubles, while you've still got this alternate image. It's not about being in a different place or being in heaven, it's about seeing the world through magical eyes for a moment, and then being back in that same world, and everything is dull and gray. Having to remember the color.

When I was working at Omega, I took this Zen retreat, where you're quiet, you don't say anything for a week, and this guy there said, "You're going to be enlightened at the end of this week, that's my goal." I was the engineer, so I was recording everything at it was happening, but I was also participating, because I felt like it. So at the end of it, I did understand what enlightenment was, one-hundred percent.

So Nemerov showed us this picture, which is of Apollo flaying Marcius. You don't think of Apollo as being the sort of person who would skin someone alive. But the story behind it was that there was this guy who was a really great musician, and all the women loved him, and people started saying he was the best musician in the world, so Apollo got jealous and he challenged this guy to a musical dual. They would each play a song and the muses would judge who was the better musician.

I remember reading a book that was on songwriting at some point that I found in my dad's store, and just... I did not relate at all. I've always hated structure of all kinds, it just doesn't work for me. I can never fit into the schedules of other people. It's like putting a schedule on your song, and it doesn't allow you to be moved by your own music.

Usually, I think it's best to play the song for them once and have them mix it up on the spot, because when the logical mind gets too involved, I think it kills a lot of magic. I just think the subconscious mind is so much smarter, and unfortunately, people do not trust their subconscious. A lot of people just don't access to all of that, the secret genius that's inside of them. And it's so much easier to get it out of a musician if you don't give them a chance to overthink.

It's the sense of walking back into the Garden of Eden or something like that. Where suddenly everything is perfect and you see how you're connected to everything in the world.