Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's been a transformative period and I really wanted to make music from what I've experienced.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I'm a big fan of '70s records where artists could draw on whatever influences they wanted.
I'd experimented with so many different types of music. I had these folky songs I'd written and recorded, but something wasn't quite right.
Making music all the time was my dream.
I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.
I want to make the music that people remember, and it doesn't need a trend; it doesn't need to be constantly hyped. There's no time period for it. That's the type of music I want to make.
It's not until I hear songs that I've done, that I realize how much of an inspiration music from the '60s and '70s has been.
I knew I wanted to make a concept record in song-cycle form, like my favorite Marvin Gaye records where everything just continuously flows.
I'd always been on the giving end of music and creating.