That softness around your eyes, a softness in your face. Almost the way you feel when you’re about to start crying. That, to me, is love. It can be romantic love, it can be friendship love, it can be family love, it can be love for a chipmunk. It can be love for anything.
A lot of people have realized that a good spiritual practice and a good meditation practice have real benefit. It’s not just something nice to do to make the universe happy.
People who meditate and have a good spiritual practice, their immune systems are stronger. Generally, they are happier and healthier.
For me, love is very non-academic. Love, it’s a very physical thing. I don’t mean physical in terms of – I mean, it can be sexual. But those moments when I’m aware of the fact that I love someone or love something, it really manifests physically.
I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.
It’s perfectly natural for me to sit down and talk about meditating and spiritual practice with my friends. But then I realize, how would it sound to a drunk cynical guy in London?
The main thing that excites me and makes me want to get out of bed is the thought of being able to go into my studio to work on music.
What makes me vulnerable is any genuine expression of emotion in the presence of another person. It makes me vulnerable and my inclination is, of course, immediately to back away from anything that makes me vulnerable.
I find London really exciting but there’s a lot of vicious success here. Like New York, there’s a lot of incredibly successful people who feel incredibly entitled, perhaps justifiably, but I don’t want to be around viciously entitled people.
I think that growing up very poor in a very wealthy town gave me a sense of being an outsider, and I hated it when I was growing up.
I was trying to convince myself I could learn to be gay – but no. That’s one of my great regrets.
A vegan who beats his wife is far further down the ethical ladder than a meat eater who’s kind to his children.
We almost need to cultivate – I hate to sound New Age-y – but to cultivate a positive bias, and really work to focus on those things and notice those things that are wonderful and uplifting.
I have to say that being a vegan in 1986 or whenever was a lot different than being a vegan in 2012. You’d go to health foods stores and basically your choice was between Mung beans and nutritional yeast, and that’s about it.
By being vulnerable, either with yourself or in the presence of another person, that’s where all growth and ultimate well-being comes from.
Biologically we’re all the same. We all get sad, we all get happy, and we all die. Anyone who pretends that that’s not the case is either a sociopath or utterly delusional.
If I were to be really petulant, I would say New York is the one doing the betraying. Because the New York I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore.
Can’t do any work with a rock star; you have to go through their lawyers and their agents and their managers and you have to book them hotel rooms. When you work with your friends, you just call them up and they come over and you record and then you go out to see a movie.
Maybe it’s a form of overcompensation, but whenever I’ve toured, I’ve always needed a huge performance component.
I’ve experienced tons of failure. I’ve been making music for 30 years, and I’d say failure and success have happened in equal measure.