Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

You know, the thing that struck me about Civil War music was how bloody it was; it was full of hatred. There was incredible vitriol in it.

The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.

Technology changes nothing.

I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.

There's always been an incredible amount of junk music, and junk everything. Marshall McLuhan said that a medium surrounds a previous medium, and turns the previous medium into an art form. So, what was once a junk culture, like film, television surrounded it and turned it into an art form.

I can tell for sure, the technologists have made it clear that they don't care about musicians. The arts have been sacrificed on the altar of technological advancement.