I have to try and change the landscape, whatever it is.
Being good isn't just about being dextrous and being flash. Being good is about being an all-round contributor in the great world of music.
I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.
I've lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity which I try and avoid.
I was young - I was 20 years old. Now I have the gift of perspective and I feel pretty good about it.
There's no point stepping up to the golden platform if you're going to repeat yourself.
It's amazing, it's pumping, it's furious, it's anxious, it's happy and it's far more real than anything you'll ever experience in a Western city. Morocco is a living, pulsating entity which is rapidly changing all the time but there are parts of Marrakesh that carry on as they have done for a thousands years. The music is a reflection of that, of all times and all religions and of all the natural expectations and conditions of the people who live there.
Soon, I'm going to need help crossing the street.
I can't regret until the end. And I won't regret then, either.
When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do. I'm able to actually choose places to go which have intrigued me for the last god knows how many years, and Tasmania's always been one of those places. I see it all and yet I see so little because it's so fast.
When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do.
Possibly the whole creative whirlwind of any musician's life is based on garnering and developing and absorbing more and more experience.
Well, when I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten year old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old... I think! And I always wanted to be a certain, a bit similar to that. But I didn't want to sell pizza.
My sort of stability as a character, it's never been one of my strongest attributes. I'm a bit of a clusterf*ck. I get so many great ideas that I kind of mesmerize people with another plan before the previous plan is hatched out.
It's a two-dimensional gig being a singer, and you can get lost in your own tedium and repetition.
I'm not interested in being known as the singer from Led Zeppelin.
I use the music almost as a compass in some kind of quasi-romantic way. I try and go to places that I'm intrigued by, and I take this music with me, using my name at the front.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
It's part of me to get off on those moments where... well, what people would call attention. Obviously, that isn't the be-all and end-all of life, but at the states of creativity that I've reached, well, it helps the lyrics along a little bit.
You can't even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.
Theatres are built because they were the boards for entertainment.
There's so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way.
I think I'm prone to panic.
I don't see what the point is in growing up.
Circumspection is not one of my better, favorite conditions, really.
