Innovation is costly—it eats away at your life, your time. It makes a mockery of you as you stand there with your pants down, as you make noises in the studio. It laughs at every failure and has no patience for dreams. I still suffer the blows of insecurity, as I get it all wrong twenty times, but on the twenty-first time I may get it right, and th

He was funny and looked sharp—very charming, and women like men who are charming. So much gets overlooked in the name of charm.

There is a difference between admiring something from a distance and being in it.

Dimension on a song relates to “depth of field.” As human beings we find comfort in depth: something that sounds far away is not an immediate danger; we are programmed to relax when prey is at a distance. Close sounds can be quiet and comforting, like the whispering of sweet nothings. A sweet nothing will still communicate over thunder, as long as

When I hear a bass line that I love, I run and hide and remember.

The shame about being expert and knowledgeable is that when you are in the depths of your work, you have the least amount of objectivity. If a button could be pushed to fully cleanse the palate and beam you back into the situation with a full sense of awareness, that’s the button I’d pay any amount of money for.

You can frame your work with whatever you want, but the center must have soul.

This is not a glamorous chapter; it’s a chapter of limbo that takes place before Eno, before any of the big albums. It’s about putting in time because I had no better invitations to respond to, and so to pay the bills and to keep on playing music, I hit the road for a long time, making a hundred and fifty dollars a week. I’ve tried to block out thi

My morning route afforded me some isolated time away from adults, time for a child’s imagination to grow. There’s something powerful that happens when you rise before the rest of the world. The feeling of freedom or rebirth that I imagine the birds feel every morning also belongs to a newspaper delivery boy. The two voices or characters in my head