What I love about making albums in the 21st century is that so few people buy albums! I can make an album without any commercial concerns whatsoever.

Up until I started working with him, I had thought that music was a nice thing that I enjoyed and liked making, but it wasn’t a serious healing modality. What Dr. Sacks has proven is that music is actually a quantifiable, profound healing modality.

There is a dysfunctional strangeness to Los Angeles that doesn't exist in any other western city. The roads are crumbling, no-one knows what they're doing, the city government barely works.

More often than not, whenever gossip has been written about me, the gossip is more interesting than the reality. I know some public figures hate gossip, but personally I like it because it makes my life sound more glamorous and interesting than it really is.

Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don't know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that's what inspires my interest.

If you're inclined to dismiss L.A. as a place of unrelenting vapidity and generic 1980s architecture, then you're doing yourself and L.A. a huge disservice, and you're just not looking hard enough.

I met Elton John at an Interview dinner, and we just sort of became friends. He's got such a wicked sense of humor.