I think you have to want to be really famous. It's a lot easier to sabotage your career than to have a career to sabotage.

I think filmmakers all secretly wanna be musicians and all musicians secretly wanna be filmmakers.

There's the idea that you have to know how to solve the world's problems in order to feel that something is morally wrong. I'm always back and forth between optimism and depression about the situation.

While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it's a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.

It would get really alienating, to have my face be the face of a cause. So much just comes down to the songs. I just want to give us the opportunity to write great songs. Even our work in Haiti is limited by how good our songs are. We just need to get rid of as much of the bullshit as possible, so we can have a life, so we have something to write about.

Music is made by individuals. Some artists will be very politically overt in their songs, some will be more subtle. You have to be true to yourself, true to your nature.

There's this idea, particularly in pop music and a lot of these pop father/manager types, that you're selling the person instead of the song. You basically want to create something that the fans relate to because it's exactly like them. So there's a lot of art that's made to be in the image of the audience, but then the audience is imitating this version of themselves. It's a really weird cultural feedback loop, and it's kind of strange to watch. It's a new thing since I was a kid, really a different thing.