I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

You know, most love songs are not cheesy and corny. Most love songs are complaints, I think. Or about unrequited love, coming at it from some oblique angle. Only the ones that say "I love you" over and over are the cheesy, corny ones that people complain about

I actually prefer to hear small groups of instruments. Orchestras seem to lack a texture for me, or variety of texture. There's only about ten things you can do with one note in a string section. But a lone violin is continuously changing textures.

There's a whole kind of melancholy that you can only attain with reverb. That's an example of a technology introducing a whole new meaning.

When you're making a singular pop song, you don't really need any subject matter. You just sort of say, "Uh, I love you." And then you try to figure out some rhyme for that, and there never is one.

Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.