What excited me when I first came into it was the performing aspect and doing blues-oriented material, rock/blues oriented stuff, basic stuff, basic what they call rock 'n' roll.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.

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

There's no man alive who has any answers. We all know that. It's like the guru trip. All a guru can do is direct you to something that you probably already know about yourself, something you might want to followup on. Apply the same thing to music and records. You might get something from a particular record that hits a nerve and something inside you. But that's your vision of it.

[Touring] is not necessarily a priority. It's just a part of who I am as a performer. That's obviously why I'm doing it; why I'm in this business is part of me has to perform.