I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

I have nothing against bombastic music, but when it comes to making albums, I'd prefer to make music that has a sort of vulnerable subtlety to it.

The idea of feeling old is much more the worry of a slightly younger person. When you are getting old, that becomes - psssh - completely secondary to the absolute understanding of how short your life is.

I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

Over time I just realised the world is a very complicated place, and there is not a single structured belief system that adequately and comprehensively describes every aspect of our existence. So that is my new approach to life and spirituality - I don't know anything, except on a very naive and subjective level.

When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.