Almost everything The Beatles did was great, and it's hard to improve on. They were our Bach. The way to get around it may be to keep it as simple as possible.

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.

I love loud music. I listen loud, and that's part of how I've learned how to do this. Record softly and play back loud and a whole other thing happens.

Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.

Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises.

My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.

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.