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I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.

Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

I had learned classical guitar when I was a kid, and I embraced it, and apparently I got good at it.

Of course we had the best possible classical education, which gave us a very strong foundation and tradition. But we also learned a lot by collaborating with different pop/rock artists and especially by recording and working in the studio.

We all had a desire and appreciation for such a wide range of music.

I loved the guitar, and I had all of this music in my head. My passion for the guitar and the ideas for what I could create musically were equal. So that's where I was.

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.