My mother passed at the end of the Circus tour. After that I really needed to take some time and just chill out and get my head together.

We're beginning to play God and get into cloning. We give up quickly. Divorce is an easy option. So why not just create your own mate? Synthesize a human being. You get tired of it, turn it off and put it in the closet like the vacuum cleaner.

I think it'd be a real nightmare to put a record out and sell 20 million copies and then that's it.

I find cooking to be the one thing that relaxes me. I don't get to do it often . . .

My career has been a gradual climb. I think that's part of the reason why I've had longevity.

If you look at the guys in the '70s, like Led Zeppelin, they had bigger planes than we do, they had more money. But they weren't singing about it.

If you go to Japan, they're still buying vinyl, and they want the education. They know who's playing on what tracks from the '60s and the '70s - who the guitar player is, who the drummer is, who the producer was, what studio it was recorded in. That's how I grew up listening to music. We bought albums. We read the liner notes. It was important to know the whole history behind it.