The melodies are always the most important part to me. I am pulled more to the groove than the chord progression. After you find the groove, you find the most simple chord progressions and then sit inside that groove.
I think I am a very kind person. I think I’m joyful, but I could be kinder and I could be more joyful. I do believe peace is a state of grace, and not the absence of violence.
For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there’s some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.
I definitely like the oddballs. There’s a song called ‘Little Thing,’ which is the only song that I have recorded that has no words. And it’s the one that I get past my critic inside me.
It is criminal to put our servicemen and women in harm’s way and to put the lives of so many civilians on the line for the misguided frustrations of the Bush administration.
When I listen to my favorite songwriters, they have such simple melodies and chords. I occasionally manage to stop at the right time, but all too often I keep on going until I have way too many notes and words. But that’s just what I do.
So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us.
I think I’m probably a very sad man wrapped in a very joyful package, and I think I’m very resilient, and I think I’m quite generous, sometimes to a fault. And I’m very bad with money, but I don’t see that too much of a flaw.
I’m partly obsessed by aging gracefully.
I was regularly advised not to go into music, that I should give up that foolish dream.
I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can’t believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.
I don’t believe in trickle-down economics. I don’t think that people who have the most are inclined to share it, generally.
There’s a freedom to being young that is harder to come by as time goes on.
Good music is good music, and everything else can go to hell.
I’m familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation.
I’m a bit of a caveman – I don’t go out into the digital space very often. I lie facedown on the grass and count how many bugs I can find.
I’m a fairly tormented artist, and I’m less willing to indulge myself in self-pity, outside of songwriting.
I don’t think socialism, and I don’t think warmness and respect are necessarily bad words.
I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.
Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.