When I left Genesis, I just wanted to be out of the music business. I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.
Most of my fans, if you were to look on their iPods, you'd see every possible genre of music represented in some capacity.
I love music, of course, and many, many, many genres. There are hardly any songs I would say that I hate. There's a couple, and I don't even know exactly why I don't like them.
Subconciously, the things you listen to and you believe in, those things are going to come out, you know what I mean? I think you take that and make it your sound; that's what I do when I'm putting together genres of music.
When you find new genres of music, you take ownership of them.
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy. For the Australian arts and Australian music, losing Tozer is like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss. The kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden.
This quality, I mean Geoffrey was with me, was very easy doing - he loved me very much, I loved him very much, and we understood each other so well that it was a pleasure to make music.
With Geoffrey, it was the first time we did music together, we understood that everything could be well, and without any problem. And we didn't need to rehearse too much.
Seattle very much benefited from this geography where it was a town nobody had really heard of in terms of a music scene. So we had that factor of being a new discovery.
There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
How can German music not be represented by an article?
I was raised in the Methodist Church, which is a very Germanic, military kind of music they have there. I heard this other music on the radio: Pentecostal. That was right up my street.
I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.
My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music - Gershwin, all kinds of stuff.
As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.
I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards - Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.
The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.
He's a world-famous name to people who care about his music, but there are many people who have never heard of George Gershwin and those numbers increase.
To me, racism is so played out and corny and stupid, especially in music, where you now have Nelly doing songs with Tim McGraw, on the hit single 'Over and Over.' Anyone who thinks about that just needs to get a life.
