Article   Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III >Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI     Excerpts from IMPETUS No. 8, '78

AP: My mother was a classical musician so I was into hearing chamber music playing me to sleep at night, which was quite nice. Then I discovered jazz at an early age and got into that. Then I met Gary (Peacock) and was exposed to all the latest avant garde sounds and I found that was like my 'home'. That was it for me. In New York at that time there were Paul and Carla (Bley) and Paul Haines. At that time I wasn't composing professionally but I was composing and it was Paul who found the need to have some problems solved. At the time I came to New York there wasn't anything but a lot of energy -- a lot of screaming in the lofts; it was just sheer anarchy. This was about '64 and there was this situation with all this freedom and lots of possibilities for the composer to resolve for the musicians. With Paul (Bley) it was a question of providing an environment for him to create in. >>>So I choose to go in the direction of ballads, which was a lot of space and a lot of peace and quiet. It was very difficult at the time to get musicians to play this, they hadn't done that. Drummers, for instance, would say, "Well, what am I going to play on this?" -- drummers want some motion. So a different style developed: the waves (like Barry Altschul developed), space and silences, and the whole sole thing that Paul (Bley) got into and then the ECM label. That was the concept that I worked on exclusively, it was the contribution I made for free music. In fact I worked on it so exclusively that Paul would say to me, "Aren't you going to write anything else but ballads?" That was all I really wanted to write. >>>I would imagine that it came out of being a woman and being feminine you know. Having this feeling of subtlety, this feeling of the possibility and freedom of space, and gentleness. Eventually, after six years of concept that's found on those ECM albums and the albums that Paul is putting out on his own label (Improvising Artists, Inc.) Had the group line-up remained constant during those six years? AP: Except for the bass player. The bass players kept changing. But the role of the drums was more important -- much more important than the role of the bass player to define that music. At what stage did you become involved in the electronics that one associates with much of your early work? AP: We want over to a critic's house -- Don Heckman of the New York Times -- just to hang out with him and we asked him if he'd heard anything new. He said, "well, there's this one by Walter Carlos of synthesizer music," and he played it for us. I fell right in love with it; it was the first new instrument in three hundred years. I just kept asking Paul about it, but he wasn't too enthusiastic about it in the beginning... >>>There's quite a funny story... on the way over to see Robert Moog I psyched out exactly the take with him in terms of interesting him in giving us a synthesizer because we didn't have any money. So Paul said, "We've got to take the synthesizer away; if we don't take it away with us then was won't get it," so we went over in the station wagon we got all Paul's publicity and press and went over there. We thought that Walter Carlos was getting a lot of attention and credit and we felt that as Robert Moog had invented the instrument he might like a little bit of it himself. So we took the tack that we were going to create music with it rather than just use it as a 'jingle'-type instrument and we ere going to incorporate it into the main field of music, give it some dignity and the respect it deserves. So we went up there and Paul did the rap and I just stood around looking charming and lovely... and we drove away that night with a synthesizer. >>>We took it back to New York where nobody knew what a synthesizer was. Not only that, but anyone who did know what it was, or who had been working on it -- the commercial people -- wouldn't tell you anything about it, and there was no information out about it. So we had this thing that looked like an air-craft cockpit and it was just sitting in our bedroom. We just looking looked at it every morning for about six months saying "What are we going to do with it?" Then we had it in the closet in the hall, behind some curtains, and didn't tell any musicians. Finally Gary came to visit one day and I drew back the curtains and said, "Did you ever see anything like this before?" and he said "What the fuck is that?" I said "A synthesizer." He said, "A what?" Then we decided to set it up again and I started fooling around with it and patching. We had to make all these charts -- I drew the way it looked and noted the patching so we could find the sounds again. I actually invented a way to graft the voice onto it. >>>The First gig we did was at the Village Vanguard, and we had to make the audience wait twenty minutes between tunes while we changed the patching. It was ridiculous. Anyway, it went on from there. We toured Europe and carried the stuff around. the Europeans weren't very happy because they were used it Paul as an acoustic player. We had a lot of trouble with it and it didn't go down very well. >>>Then my father died and left me five thousand dollars and I produced a concert at the Philharmonic Hall. I had Leonard Bernstein's dressing room -- it was great. We did the first live concert with the synthesizer and voice. I used late night TV to promote it -- it was very cheap at the time -- and we flashed pictures of synthesizers and things on the screen. And I didn't make any money, we broke even. When I drew back the curtain on the first night there were some people out there : I was really astonished. I got some very good reviews and then we went on to do the albums and things. >>>But the only problem with the synthesizer is that it is such hard work. It's like making love to a very, very, large person: it's just really difficult. Every sound you get in order to change it you have to move so much. I wasn't really a live performing instrument, it was really behind the state of art. We invented a way of using pedals and things like that so that we could keep our hands free. We had a lot of problem to solve. It was very difficult. >>>Even when I heard Weather Report in their concert last year -- and Joe Zawinul is excellent -- there was one particular loud note that was really just painful. Did you ever hear San Ra live? He solves the problem. He has like twenty horn players, all acoustic, and the one synthesizer mic-ed up. And that balance works beautifully. He plays slow, he plays very long things against the very fast moving horn lines, which is really successful. If you're going to do that then you've really got to deal with the contrasts: the fast against the slow, the loud against the soft. You've got to use those dimensions. You have to create everything you do with it. It's not like a piano where you sit down and get some response. Synthesizer don't respond, they just do what you tell them to do; it's like a machine. After a while you feel like you're losing humanity, you begin losing the quality of being a human being when you are working with them. So both Paul and I felt like moving back from them. Since that time Paul Bley has been quite vehement in his criticism of the synthesizer. But I also get the impression that there is a side to Paul Bley that responds to the piano, which you are aware he knows intimately, but that he never achieved that through understanding and intimacy with the synthesizer. After all, the synthesizer was a much more unwieldy and primitive instrument at that time. One sense Paul was struggling to master it, but never quite succeeded. AP: No he didn't, that's just it. It was a power game, which he's very good at playing. He's a very powerful person and he likes to take control and command. Did you see his concert at the Shaw theater? It was brilliant. Although it was a terrible piano and out of tune, he just took control and mastered it. I think it was the thing with the synthesizers. It was: "I'll get on top of you yet -- I'll take control of you yet." But it was a constant battle. I think he enjoyed it at the beginning, but it wears after a while. >>>But still -- it opened up a lot of horizons. Everything you experience affects you including working with electronics you can really play slow, you can really get into sustain. You can take a note and change the whole thing: the decay and rise time, the timbers, everything. I think that opened up his head quite a bit, in fact his playing did develop really quick. I think it was a very positive thing. >>>I think eventually people will get into that kind of thing again. I always felt that people would again start treating voices electrically. Now I hear there's a group called Suicide that does something like that. I think it's an inevitable kind of avenue to take. >>>It's not always good to be first. It's maybe sometimes better to be last, so everyone else makes the mistake and then you come along and do it best! I'm not so into being first as I used to be. At the beginning of a career artists want to make an identity for themselves, they rush to be first. That's part of one's evolution, and I'm not sorry that I did it, even though the album are a little rough and primitive. It was a lot of fun doing them. But I think the rough edges are part of the appeal of those early records; there's a lot of honesty about them that often the more polished articles lack. AP: That honesty is part of my philosophy -- and I don't want to get too far away from that. That's the thing I find, you know, although I can appreciate very polished things, and I can enjoy playing them, it doesn't excite me like when you hear a record that somebody's taking chances on. It would be nice to have a balance of both things, which is what I've started trying to do on this album X-DREAMS. It's organized, but it's got people really playing and improvising and stuff. >>>The thing that interests me at this point in time, coming from working with all the freedoms where you can do anything you want to do and take as much time as you want to take, is to work within traditional forms and see just how free one can get them. That is, without losing the character of the blues, a country and western, or whatever it is. The main thing is to be imaginative and creative with it. That's what's so depressing: you find people reproducing the same formula over and over and over again, with one little wrinkle in it pariahs. But music isn't about that, then it's not a personal expression, it's a product like cornflakes. You've got lost the whole individual expression, communicating with people, you've lost the artist -- the artist doesn't exist any more -- and then there's no reason to continue. They're the reason that I was in it in the first place. That I find very defeating in the whole business. It's a trap that so many people fall into. You can name dozens who just defeating in the whole business. AP: And then they can't get out of it. the people won't let then get it out of it. Everyone says to you "Do this way, and then when you get successful you can do what you want." But it doesn't work that way. >>>What destroy the creative impetus in an artist is the fact that they lose their imagination. The whole system prevents them from continuing: you can't then grow as fast as you want to grow, you have to grow at the speed of market place. The market place is very big and takes a long time to grow, it's much slower than the individual who can quickly assimilate a lot of information and experience. So when they keep doing that one thing over and over again and suddenly they find out that their muse, or whatever it was that worked for then that made them creative, is lost. And they just can't get it back again. That's one of the refreshing things about Bowie, that he's constantly changing direction. AP: He stays very much in contact with people. He's a very social creature, he's always hanging out and getting experiences. He likes working with good musicians. This is a thing Brian Eno claims he doesn't like doing, he says, "Oh, you like working with good musicians, but I don't." I don't know why. It possibly has something to do with his ideas on chance. A good musician is less likely to make mistakes than less accomplished musician, so perhaps he feels that from the chance interaction of mistakes some interesting new possibilities might emerge. AP: I've dealt with the mistakes already, in the compositions. Too many mistakes would make it completely inaccessible, so I like musicians who can smooth it out a bit. It really helps to get that kind of sound, Plus the fact that with good musicians it's easier getting things together: it takes less time, they're sensitive, they can get around their instrument, they don't have any blocks about it, they can play whatever they hear... Isn't it also a part of not having recently worked with a band such, but always having been 'Annette Peacock plus musicians'. If you're not working with a regular musicians who can find out where you are and what you can find out where you are and what you want form a particular line and instrument and equate the two quickly. 'whereas if you had a regular band then the musicianship wouldn't necessary have to be of such a high caliber because you could work things through together, and have time to do it. AP: The problem is finding players who have enough dimension. If you find players who can play free then they can't play rock and if you've got rock players then they can't play free. So I've been forced to emerge and express the things I want to express working with lots of different people who can do the different things very well. >>>I originally wanted to come to England and form a band that played practically. But what happened in England is that they lost the whole middle period that happened in New York so they're torn between total chaos (that they consider to be free jazz) and trad. You didn't have this step in between like Jimmy Guiffre and Paul (Bley) were creating at the time. So they didn't know what was happening, and they couldn't relate, in a sense, to a music that was moving freely through chords and through time together, as a band. So maybe I tried to do it with too many players at once, too many instruments. But I found it was impossible to get that working so I had to take another tack. Which was the solo approach... just you and the keyboards. AP: I decided to do that. Just doing it solo, and trying to work some solo things out. Trying to put that out by myself, as I couldn't do it with anybody else. And that was why this very low-key approach to gigs was adapted? AP: All I wanted to do at the time was just to get back into performing. I did other things like performing at the Zanzibar, and all kinds of places that I hadn't played before, by myself. I just wanted to work solo for a while and see if I could hold an audience for forty minutes by myself. I did it just find it out. >>>Also it's a good thing to listen to your music through your audience's ears, to hear it back. You can do that when you're playing, you can hear the audience reactions. Just to sit in a wine bar and play the piano and sing while everybody was chatting -- these experiences I had never done because when I'd been working with Paul we were suddenly on the big stage (like Montreux) and it was just case of 'do or die', just having lot of bravely and cheek and pulling it off. So I'd missed the whole intermediate thing that people usually do as clubs and work your way up. And since I hadn't performed for three years I thought that was what I wanted to do. Just getting back in the swing of things. That early work with Paul Bley resulted in three collaboratory albums and eventually your solo record, I'm the One. Your lyrics are often printed on the record covers (and reveal themselves to be thoughtfully constructed, rather than the generally low standard of lyrics so often associated with jazz base material). Yet on the record itself the vocals are often overwhelmed by the electronic treatments becoming almost just a vehicle for the vocal line. However the fact that they have been printed on the sleeve suggests you see then as more than that. What sort of balance between the sense and the music of the lyrics were you aiming for? AP: The problem was that at the time I was trying to perform two functions: as a singer and lyricist and in using the voice as an instrument. And that was a bit confusing, it was difficult to do both things at once but I'd always bite off more moderate these days and do a little bit less, The less you do the easier it is for people to relate it. Actually they pay you more to do less; you can't understand it, you want to give your all and do as much as you possibly can, but it doesn't work that way. But I was very young and very passionate, had all this energy and I just wanted to do everything all at once. I was trying to make several points at the same time. I had a rock background with the voice, a free jazz background with the lyrics. I was trying to cover many territories at once. Now it's getting a little bit more focused. I'm feeling clearer about what I want to do in creating an environment for the voice and lyrics. DUAL UNITY found you working with Hans Bennink, a superficially unlikely combination. How did that particular grouping come out? AP: What happened was that during the tour we were in Berlin and we went to hear them. We were just hanging out in a club and there was Han Bennink and Peter Brotzmann doing a duet. I was just holding my sides laughing, it was like he (Han Bennink) thought he was in a butcher's shop and they were cutting heads off chickens or something. Afterwards I just went up to him and said, "You're the most amazing drummer I've ever heard, " he was very sweet and said, "Thank you very much". I said, "Paul, we've got to work with him", and Paul said, "Are you kidding?.... He'll kill us." I said, " Don't worry, with the synthesizer we've got all the volume; we can wipe him out if we need to." So we did some gigs, which went really well. That's how we ended up working with them. >>>The next thing with Han is that he's so powerful. The only way you can control him is to constantly throw him off guard, So the free-er you are, the more imaginative you are, the more surprising you are, the more he stays and relates. Otherwise he just goes off on his own and you're just left standing. We managed to psyche that out and I played that role while Paul solos, an intermediate role, like the bass player's. It went very well considering that was the first time together. Those tapes are the first time we played together. >>>But Han is such an amazing drummer: he can do anything. Any way you want to go he can go, and he's ready and he's there. He was the first drummer I had heard who was, in a sense, an electronic drummer because he had so many sounds. Following the release of those early records, and particularly I'm the One, David Bowie's management (at that time) Mainman, signed you up. What do you think attracted Mainman to you n the first place? AP: David Bowie. David Bowie was crazy about me. He kept talking about me. I asked Tony (DeFries) what ad happened. He said, " David was talking about you for a whole year. I listen to everything; he has millions of ideas, but the things he talks about consistently are the ones I pay attentions to." >>>The first time I met him was in the studio when I was recording the RCA thing, I didn't know he was David Bowie. I have this thing about not having anyone in the studio who isn't directly involved in the music, because I think it's distracting for the musicians. So I asked somebody to get him to leave and the next thing I knew he'd got a copy of the record and he liked it. He talked Tony DeFries quite a bit about it and then I met Tony at the Columbia convention and He eventually signed me up. It seemed at the time as if what he was interested in doing was withholding you from the public in order to build up a kind of mystique about you, which would have been fairly straightforward on the basis of these quite weird albums which bore your name when so little other information filtered through about you. But it seemed as if before he got around to doing anything the whole thing fell through. AP: I think you might be right. I think he wanted to erase the jazz element in my background and that image because jazz wasn't selling at that time -- jazz records had very limited sales. That observation seems to be quite astute. >>>What happened with Mainman was that he (Tony DeFries) was so busy promoting David (Bowie) that he didn't have time to work on anything else. So for a year he just paid all the bills, gave me studio time -- with a charge account at the Record Plant in New York and at the Lenny's Music Store. So I bought a lot of equipment and did some recordings. But he said no to a lot of things. He said no to a supersession with Al Cooper and Mike Bloomfield, and Al Cooper wanted to produce a solo album -- the first one on MCA -- he said no to that. He said no to The Newport Jazz Festival where we were going to do an electronic night with Chick Corea and Paul Bley and where I was going to play with my own group. As he was paying all the bills I felt that he had a right to make those decisions at the time. He was talking about that not being the right way to break me and I should wait until I had control over it, but he never had really had the time to devote it. >>>So I finally said no to him. What else could I do? There was no activity at all. Then I came to do a tour in Scandinavia and came to England to get my plane back. I was negotiating with Essex Music to do a publishing deal and missed my plane back. I had no money, I tried to get some things to sold but it just didn't happen. I just waited around for things. >>>I just couldn't get anything sold, it was as simple as that. No one wanted to buy any of my product. There was a depression in the record business during the seventies. I knocked few doors and when I saw there was no response I wasn't about to bruise my knuckles. So I came out to the country for three years, fell in love, wrote some music and just enjoy life while I waited for things to happen and waited for the phone ring -- which it didn't do too often -- but I got a couple of nice phone calls and landed up making another record. >>>I had a feeling that a movement was going to happen out of England. And it did... the new wave thing happened. But that was the kind of tapes that I was trying to sell when I first came here '74. Those were the tapes that appear on the first side of (of X-DREAMS) that I'd done earlier in New York. But no one wanted anything to do with them. Record companies don't sit up and take notice of an individual, they take notice of a movement. Even with Dylan it was a whole movement: Columbia signed up a lot of artists who were in the folk thing at that time, and some of them broke really big. So I just sit around and wait for the right time. I've learned a lot about patience, let me tell you. At the time there was talk of Brian Eno recording you for an album to be released on his Obscure label. Did anything concrete ever grow out of that? AP: Brian came down and recorded the first solo gig at the Phoenix and we went to Island studio and we were going to do a solo vocal track for an album he wanted to do of vocals. We disputed over the fact that he wanted to do it with the voice alone. Then I think he got sidetrack from doing the album because he started at that time working with Bowie and then got in to doing a lot other things. I don't know what happened to his label, Obscure. Management (with whom Eno is signed) moved over to Polydor. However, Polydor seen to have taken on Obscure and are slowly re-releasing all those albums. AP: I think at that time he was negotiating between virgin and Island and trying to make up his mid about these things. Anyway, we'd done these studio things and I'd experimented around and I was going to come back and make decisions about some thing we were going to record but we never actually got back together. I didn't follow it up and neither did he. Anyway, I'm going to speak to him when he comes back and find out what he's going to do with the tapes, if anything. If not then perhaps he'll give them back to me. There's no point in them sitting around in his collection if he's not going to do anything. But he given me beautiful speakers to look after for him in the meantime, which I very much appreciate. He was going to open his own studio as well, which didn't seem happen either. >>>But person like that he's got so many possibilities and choices if things to do, it's difficult to focus his attnetion. Another recording venture had been your involvement with Bill Bruford on his solo album Feels Good To Me. How did you become involved in that? AP: I met Bill and we went into the studio and recorded some things. We did 'Real and Defined Androgens', second track on the new album, and he really liked my voice. When he came to do his album (this is the story he told me anyway) he asked Robert Wyatt still wasn't doing anybody else's material and he said to get Max Bygraves to do the bottom notes and Gracie Fields for the top ones. So Bill immediately called me up, and that's how it happened. >>>I can sing anything you know? Bill says I'm a character actor in that I don't really sing so much as act the parts, which is probably true. If you listen to the album the voice and the personalities change from track to track. So since I don't study music (like a 'Cleo Laine') and just work on my instruments and my lyrics that's what I have to do. >>>Once I compose a song I have to find a way to sing it, Paul says, "Why don't you compose something that you can sing for a change? So that you don't have to figure out a way to sing it?" But as result of that I seem to have developed a style I can do pretty much what to do with my voice. At your Roundhouse Downstairs concert with Pete Lemer you prefixed and suffixed your solo set with songs on tape that you'd recorded with other musicians. Are any of those songs on X-DREAMS? AP: Yes. Different mixes and things like that, but they're there. Were they originally recorded with a specific view to putting out an album at that time? AP: No. I had no record deal in the offing at all. I had a couple of ballads... you know how it is, I had a couple of ideas and I just thought I'd try them out. It seems very much as if you wanted to use this album to present the continuity of ideas that you have evolved since 1972 (when you released I'm the One) including material from your time in America. AP: The first track was recorded in America in 1972, the rest was recorded in England. If I'd recorded a completely new album those tapes would never have been put out. Record new material is what I want to do now. But a lot of people felt that those tapes were worthy of coming out, that they were definitive tapes even though they were very spontaneous. That do accomplish something in that there isn't any thing like that really. Ideally of course one would like to stay with a concept long enough to make one album if the total thing. However, I'm very happy with this album as an idea -- I think it's quite interesting to be able to show that much dimension on an album. Present continuing ideas rather than an isolated facet. I'd like to record another one right away, that's current. Would that be AURA again? AP: I don't know until we work out the terms of the contract -- and you can print that! I really don't know, but some friends of mine (some nineteen years old friends) have a really great philosophy: just take it as it comes. This business is very uncertain any way unless you have total control over everything, which is of course ideal, but not easy to get. If you feel ready to make a new album can you visualize what directions your music might take? AP: I always ready to make a new album. I've just so much material. But I'm not going to do hard rock anymore, I'm not interested in doing that. The only way I'll do hard rock is for someone like Bill Bruford. I'm just crazy about his drumming and working with really good improvising musicians. >>>I'd like to deal just deal with the philosophy of the songs. I want to just take all the forms I can think of for songs and just be as free as I possibly can with them. I want to incorporate all the things I was doing with Paul -- but not the totally free things -- I want to incorporate time changes. I don't want anything free, I want the illusion of freedom without it being totally free. I want changes of tempi and mood in ways which sound very into the lyrics at the moment in terms of philosophy, people, relationships and things like that. >>>I think I'd like to make alternative kinds of singles. I'd programme songs to be singles -- but not in the traditional sense. They'd be just exactly the way the singles go, with a hook in it and all that kind of things. I can never do anything really straight anyway, no matter how hard you try, so it doesn't do me any harm to do it. You said you that you're not really interested in working with the hard rock format any more. Why is that? AP: Well, I don't really like the louder sorts of music you know. If I'm here at home and I listen to music I'm either going to dance to it (in which case it's going to be the disco music and stuff like that) but if I just have music playing I prefer something a little bit more delicate and gentle. I think a lot of people feel that way, and that's why ECM had sold extremely well. >>>I think that's going to be a trend -- I can feel it. I'm usually ahead of my time so maybe I'm not right. But I think that inevitably there will eventually be a trend back from all the hard, heavy things to something that is easier. Especially if you want to say something that is meaningful and profound: people take it so much better if you're not beating then over the head with it, if you say it gently and softly. You said earlier that bringing in this gentler approach to the free music in the early days was possibly a result of your femininity. What effect do you think that being a woman has played on your career in terms of both you music and the way that the business had reacted to you? AP: It is very difficult. Men have an attitude towards a woman based on their own personal experiences with woman (who may, or may not, be artists); their attitude is based on their own personal relationships. Men naturally -- according to the nature of the creature -- feel that they must have control. Of course, with my nature -- being a woman -- is to let a men be in control. Once you realise that you find a way to work with them. >>>What I usually do is that I just let them have the power, and let them shape things. As they're shaping things I get an idea of how to pull it all together at the last minute and then I stand very firm on a few points (which they're not prepared for because I haven't taken a strong stand before) and that pulls it all together. But I like to work cooperatively anyway because I don't really like to have power and control. It's not on my nature say, "OK, now this is how it's got to be done". I'm not into that; I'm into a more relaxed kind of a way to make things happen. I find even in the studio when I work with musicians, if I let them have the freedom to express themselves within a song, then once they understand what the song is about they give an inspired performance which I'm always very happy with. They are more involved , so they enjoy it more and it works out for the best. >>>Of cause with Paul (Bley) when we started off it was very difficult because we were together and we were living together. I had a lot of very unhappy experiences trying to get the music done. But that's only natural; working and living together is very, very difficult. >>>The business people don't dig it, they don't take you seriously. They do now because I've been consistent long enough for them to know. But they think you're going to go off and get married and have kids and forget about your career. I don't really come on like a businesswoman or terribly outrageous or shocking; I just appear very relaxed and sensitive. Then I can have problems, because they misinterpret me and start relating to me as 'a-man-and-a-woman', and that's confusing because you're trying to do business with them. But that's not their fault either because they're man, they can't help it and I can't help being the way I am. That gets sorted out after a while. Once you understand how a man is naturally, and how you are naturally, it's easy. At the moment there is a fairly strong corpus within the women's movement that is concerned with the feminist music. Part of the argument being that there is a feminine music which has not had a chance to flourish within the context of our male-dominated societies. There is an argument which continues that this music must be allowed to develop its form and vocabulary in isolation from males because the presence of men encourages women to fall into the behavioral patterns created by the male-dominated society. Do you find yourself in sympathy or argument with these views? AP: I disagree. I think that a woman can only be really feminine while she's relating to a man and -- just as with a man relating to a woman -- her music is a manifestation of the relationships which she has and her experiences. And that's very important. In everything there's a series of aesthetic balance and its a dual kind if existence of all the opposites. I think there's a danger in getting too far away from your nature. If I'm alone I find that my music becomes so personal and eclectic that it's not going to relate to anyone. I do that quite frequently, I have long period if time in total isolation, and I might just as well make the music for myself. So I think it's very important to continue to be alive and relating to your experiences. I think men play a very big part in women's music just as women play very big part in men's music.

 

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Chapter V Chapter VI