Be foolishly in love, because love is all there is.
I'm obsessed with books.
Sometimes a little compromise isn't a bad thing. You don't need to be precious about it.
The public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic.
People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don't get approached often enough.
I don't listen to a lot of music any more and even the people I've loved for years - the Nick Drakes of this world - I can't go back to them and listen to them over and over.
I like to explore a lot of textural, arrangement aspects in the studio.
UCF stayed with me all the way, so I felt I should stay with them.
I lived long enough in a society where freedom of speech was nonexistent, and I know what kind of misery that creates - starting with the fact that life becomes very boring for people who just try to survive, and are quiet, and try not to buck the system. And, of course, it can be devastating for people who try to speak against it.
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
My first song was about the smog over Dublin in the 1980s, so yeah, I suppose I was always socially conscious. My first song was not a love song, it was about smog.