I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.

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

I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.

I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

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.

The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.