I was just getting tired of the image bullshit...that man of mystery trip and what have you. What's that all about?

[The music is about ] for the purpose of getting people to an excitement level. They feel something, they feel emotions. They're going to go home after that concert and remember it.Maybe they got something out of the experience rather than intellectualizing about what songs mean which is the whole head trip.

I haven't really heard much that's impressed me the way it was when I first heard Ray Charles or somebody like that. That was really an impression.

What was happening with me, with the album [A Period of Transition], with the people who took the pictures, the record company, everything, getting a new manager [Harvey Goldsmith]-it was all saying a period of transition to me so that was the title choice. It says what it is and obviously nobody is going to analyze that. It's exactly what it is.

There's a million things that come through when you put songs together and it's kind of difficult to pinpoint exactly what triggers it on every occasion. It's just like somebody writing a screenplay or something like that.

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

If you get into introspective blues or something where you're stretching out a bit, large audiences don't respond to this, so you have to give them what they want, basically.