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Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that.

I was always into music. And none of my friends were really into music the same way I was. So it was just different. It was really not very well understood by most of my friends. They didn't tease me about it - they just didn't really relate.

When I was young, people were almost identified solely by the kind of music they liked. People fell into categories of who liked what.

I came up not understanding that a lot of people didn't start to hear music until they went to college or were turned on by an older brother or sister.

When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.

Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

I came up during that time when music, to me, was really music. It wasn't about talking about a woman and calling them a derogatory name or something like that. It was real music.

I thought music could take you to a place where you didn't even feel ownership of it, you just felt lucky you were there. It's like church without God, or something. It's about feeling, hope and catharsis and things that are nurturing.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

It's really only all about music. It's not like a big rocket scientist kind of philosophy or anything.