A lot of people seem to get preoccupied with what I'm wearing as opposed to the music.
Music is a prerogative of those who are willing to spend time to study it, understand and love it, well aware of the fact that one life is not enough to improve just one single note of what has already been written and performed.
We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.
I've had to keep exploring different ways of presenting the music so I don't repeat myself.
As much as I don't want to admit it, my fans are the only ones that can hurt my feelings when they're not pleased with what I'm presenting. I want it to be perfect for them. I want them to have a different sense of pride in my music.
I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.
I've been in very many situations where I've not liked the other members of the band or they have not liked me. I grew up presuming that's the way music was made. It doesn't need to be that way. It's taken me years years to find that out.
I was 13 years old at music school talking to my teacher. I can't quite remember what it was I was trying to describe, but I do remember my music teacher saying to me, 'Do you have synesthesia?' In hindsight, it seems a little presumptuous of her to think a little boy in Essex would know what synesthesia was.
As for my relationship to Beethoven, I admire people who can say what they really think. It's as though he's saying, 'That's how I feel about the world, and I don't care what people may say.' His music is pure and honest. Beethoven never pretends to be anybody else.
Music is primal: when it's done without pretension, you can really feel the shape of someone's soul.
Sometimes with pop music, you have to see it to love it. With soul music, it's sparse. There's nothing that's pretentious or planned. It's just so gutsy.
I'm grateful that really pretty girls like my music, and social media just happens to like really pretty girls.
I enjoy the videos with the sound off, where you can look at the belly buttons and everything. Really some pretty girls, but I don't know about the music.
I said that when I establish myself as an artist that can do pretty much anything I want to do in music, I'm going to make a country album.
This is how much of a music geek I am: if I have a day with nothing to do, one of my favourite things is to just sit at my computer and make playlists of pretty much anything.
The first song that made me interested in music was 'Oh, Pretty Woman' by Roy Orbison. It was the guitar intro, that riff, that I really liked and made me listen in a different way.
The most moving scene for me in 'Pride and Prejudice' is the Pemberley music room scene: Elizabeth has just saved Darcy's sister from embarrassment and confusion, and as the music plays on, Darcy's look of gratitude becomes a look of love, which we see reciprocated in Elizabeth's eyes.
Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death.
When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.
Prince is gone. But the music will go on.
