Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.

I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

I think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world. The US is the Western empire of the 19th century regrouping in the 20th, not out of wickedness, but because everybody else in Eurasia was so completely destroyed by the Second World War. Economically, that was quite a useful time for the US, so they ended up in the position of enormous power. And like any great power, they're going to act in their own interests. The problem is due to what the business community wants, which is to make as much money as they can out of what other people do and pay as little as possible for it.

The missing links in my life's work, no less!

In fact, when the fires of empire get hidden, they still stay burning underneath the moss, seething away. This is true with a lot of the countries with really difficult, impenetrable nationalist movements - countries that once had a big empire, like Turkey, England, or even in Italy, with the fascists in the middle of the last century. People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.