Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.
People have habits about what they think songs should be like. There's the folky thing of: "Poor me, I'm a sensitive person in a cruel world." Or the pop thing of: "Hey, look at me, I'm sexy."
I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.
Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.
I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.
People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?
I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.
I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.
When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.
I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.
We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.
I play music a lot but on my own mostly, so it was nice to be around other people. There was a certain sense a relief in the physical act of just playing and being with other musicians.
Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.
The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.
I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.
My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.
There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.
