I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.

I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.

One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.

I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.

England has had a lot of really bad periods of music, but it's had several amazing periods where they've found an incredible balance, not just between music that's a rather complex and also pretty direct. Like the Beatles.

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.