I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

There's always stress involved in any genre or art form, there's always going to be a struggle. If there's no struggle, you wouldn't do anything. What are you going do? Retire?

My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening.

My responsibility is to fulfil what that natural thing is. The thing that I dislike about pop rock Top 40 music is that it's not natural.

I didn't know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later.

I wanted to find out why I wasn't getting off on what I was doing and try and make some sense out of the evolution of it.