So do you feel that way about your songs, that they need protecting or defending once they are released? No, not so much, because a song is sent into the world and, if you’re lucky, it is absorbed into the bloodstream of the world. The audience takes stewardship of the song. The song becomes their property. I don’t see myself as the protector of my

A promise that the intimations of the presence of those who have passed away are more than just mere wishful thinking.

You know, I’ve found that nothing is difficult to answer if you respond to a question in good faith. You just have to remember to answer the actual question as best you can. Something is being asked of you and the question itself validates the response.

Arthur showed us that – the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world. Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us.

There’s intensity towards the work that is just growing as things progress. It feels like it shouldn’t be that way, that there would be a natural easing off, a slowing down with age, but that is just not the case. Not so far at all. I don’t know what’s happening, but there is a kind of freedom, where I am no longer tied up, in any way, by the

There is a risk involved that generates a feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling that has the ability to make you feel more alive, as if you are hotwired into the job in hand, where you create, right there, on the edge of disaster. You become vulnerable because you allow yourself to be open to failure, to condemnation, to criticism, but

‘What doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.’ Is that optimism or an acceptance of life’s absurdity?

We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time,

like the audience was hungry for something – desperate. Desperate for what, do you think? Meaning. Desperate for meaning. For the music to be meaningful? No, for their lives to have meaning.