I like to make music I like rap music. Even if I'm white I support that music. If I want to support it or any other white kid wants to support it more power to them.

But I did go to music really early on even when I was 4 or 5 I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.

It's almost charity work what people have done turning other people on to my music.

I've sung other people's music all my life.

A lot of the music that you listen to now is because of the things that the Meters did the Neville Brothers did and they're there the guys who invented those beats that the guys sample today. Such an enormous opportunity.

I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English Spanish Yiddish Swahili any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.

Boy bands should be exploded from a great height. They're just pretty people singing music written by others.

Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks and I'm an upper.

It's really hard for me to sometimes put myself out there like 'Hey how do you feel about making music together?' because maybe I'm afraid of rejection or I don't want to put anybody out. It's the Southerner in me like 'I don't mean to bother you but do you mind making a song?'

The problem for me still today is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

I can play punk rock and I love playing punk rock but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

So it was out of necessity that Blackheart was born. I think it's great that now 25 years later we're not only putting out our own music but are able to put out music by other bands. That's really exciting for us.

After all in today's music scene every band seems to steal from other bands.

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which more than any other ministers to the human spirit.

Music never dies. Do we really need another Madonna tour? Does she have to compete with women performers 25 years her junior?

Music is the career I'm lucky enough to get paid for but I have other desires and passions.

When you actually like each other it translates to the music.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

From the beginning I knew intuitively that if nothing else music was safe and that nobody could tell me anything about it. Music didn't need a middleman whereas all the other things in school needed some kind of explanation.

What we don't need in country music is divisiveness public criticism of each other and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very very rich and complex and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

I believe that music is another form of news. Music is another form of journalism to me so I have to cover all the areas with my album.