Soul Mining: A Musical Life

My morning route afforded me some isolated time away from adults, time for a child’s imagination to grow. There’s something powerful that happens when you rise before the rest of the world. The feeling of freedom or rebirth that I imagine the birds feel every morning also belongs to a newspaper delivery boy. The two voices or characters in my head

When you have to teach somebody something, you become a better learner.

Some people have said that Billy and I look similar. I’ve seen the resemblance myself in photographs, but I think the real resemblance lies in obsession. We are similar in our fundamental values of kindness and lust for quality.

You can frame your work with whatever you want, but the center must have soul.

The Edge also has an amazing capacity to remember all factual information; he might have been Einstein in another life. Nothing escapes the Edge. Definitely the scientist of the band.

Being faithful to skill-building without knowledge of practical future application has always been part of me. Running on excitement, I will pursue a skill or an idea, trusting that one day it will find a home.

The Lanois brothers didn’t want to be generic; we wanted to have our own sound. This simple philosophy has been with me ever since.

The strange ability that I have to focus is hard to understand, even by me. I’m not saying this to honk my own horn; I’m saying it because it’s a psychological curiosity. I don’t even know if intelligence can be brought into the equation. During this chapter of my work, I never had a chance to think about the broader picture. The obsessive conditio

A certain kind of communication exists at the small table, two people keeps it tight, a safeguard against boardroom opinion. Small tables are not boardroom tables. Eno once said to me, “I’ll agree with whatever you say if you agree with whatever I say.” There’s nothing worse than an outside opinion if it contradicts the direction of the record I’m