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.

Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.

The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.

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.

Technology changes nothing.

We live in an age lit by lightnin'; after the flash, we're blind again.

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.