Arts is just as important as military defense, you know? Emotional defense is just as important.

There's power in the collective. If you don't believe me, just watch a symphony orchestra with a conductor and 120 people who are thinking about exactly the same thing at the same moment - no babies, no stock markets, no mortgages. Just 32nd notes.

Eight kids and a stepmother, and I just wanted to be out of there and so when I got a scholarship from Boston to the Schillinger House, which is now the Berklee School of Music, I couldn't wait to get out of there.

I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

I improvised my life along the way - I just moved step-by-step. And I knew that if I got better, something would happen.