I want to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. And I don't have the patience to grow the longest fingernails in the world. Why not be the fastest woman on four wheels? It makes complete sense.

The industry has changed in that it is far more disposable than it used to be. When Boyzone came out, we were given a shot and the patience to record our singles and albums. Nowadays, the thought is if it is not working, then the artist will be dropped. The record companies will bail on the artists, and I find that sad.

I don't think my music is that big of a deal - my entire life is parenting. The fact that I make records and go off and play shows is a small percentage of my day-to-day existence.

My son was five months old, and I built a makeshift studio in my living room so that I could do the attachment parenting approach and write the record at the same time. That was fortuitous, that we could build that in the house.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I don't know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

There's this thing called compulsory licensing law that allows artists through the record companies to take your music at will without your permission.

I don't listen to music. I very rarely listen to music. I only listen for information. I listen when a friend sends me a song or a new record.

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.

Music has always been a big part of Cheech & Chong's career, so it's just natural. You know, I was a musician before I met Cheech and had a record with Motown, and so I've got the cred.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

Play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

If I want to pad the record, just fight pretenders, get a quick paycheck and keep moving on and racking up wins, that's not something I want to be known for.

As a kid, I thought movies were boring. My parents would hire VHS recorders for the weekend and watch Bollywood movies. I'd get bored and go out to Stoke Newington common to play football.

It seems when I put together records, as Henley used to say, they're just like movies. They should have action, tension, love scenes, places to relax.

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

Distribution has really changed. You can make a record with a laptop in the morning and have it up on YouTube in the afternoon and be a star overnight. The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it's very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music.

Companies figured out that the easiest way to make money was to reissue records that the accounting department had paid for years ago and already made a profit.