I Always Use The Same Guitar; I

One Way Of Working Is Just Bring A Group Of Totally Different Musicians Together And Encourage Them To Stick To Their Guns, Not To Do The Thing That Normally Happens In A Working Situation Where Everyone Homogenizes And Concedes Certain Points - So Eventually They're All Playing In Roughly The Same Style. I Wanted Quite The Opposite Of That. I Wanted Them To Accent Their Styles, So That They Pulled Away. So There Would Be A Kind Of Space In The Middle Where I Could Operate, And Attempt To Make These Things Coalesce In Some Way. In Fact Quite A Lot Of My Stuff Has Arisen From That.

I Prefer To Shoot The Arrow, Then Paint The Target Around It. You Make The Niches In Which You Finally Reside.

Another Way Of Working Is Setting Deliberate Constraints That Aren't Musical Ones - Like Saying, "well, This Piece Is Going To Be Three Minutes And Nineteen Seconds Long And It's Going To Have Changes Here, Here And Here, And There's Going To Be A Convolution Of Events Here, And There's Going To Be A Very Fast Rhythm Here With A Very Slow Moving Part Over The Top Of It." Those Are The Sort Of Visual Ideas That I Can Draw Out On Graph Paper. I've Done A Lot Of Film Music This Way.

When You Sing With A Group Of People, You Learn How To Subsume Yourself Into A Group Consciousness Because A Capella Singing Is All About The Immersion Of The Self Into The Community. That's One Of The Great Feelings - To Stop Being Me For A Little While And To Become Us. That Way Lies Empathy, The Great Social Virtue.

I Think One Of My Pursuits Over The Years Is Trying To Answer The Question Of 'what Else Can You Do With A Voice Other Than Stand In Front Of A Microphone And Sing?'