There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

The lines of poetry the period of prose and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

I find that classical music helps put me in a place that is very calming and allows me to express emotion through my body. I played clarinet as a child so I guess I have a bit of a musical ear.

I'd love to do a modern-day musical that's full of original music. To get your contemporaries to sing and dance without looking foolish and for it to be transformational and magical and all those things a musical is supposed to be.

Although they can do it all the time you know they're far better than me on a musically on a theoretical music level. You know they're out of my league.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade a musical idea no matter how innovative is threatened.

I've programmed myself musically to come up with love-feeling tracks that are romantic sexy but classy all in one. And that's the challenge. Once I create that music then the lyrical content starts to come - you know the stories and things like that.

Music's been around a long time and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record that's the frosting on the cake but music's the main meal.

I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel it needs to be hybridised.

In the course of transferring all my CDs to my iPod I have found myself wandering the musical hallways of my past and reacquainting myself with music I haven't listened to in years.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I met Prince William at a musical festival and he let me know he was a fan of my music. But the invitation to sing at his wedding reception came completely out of the blue. The fact that Kate and William knew the words to my songs was very touching.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

We're five people five individuals who came together to create something to make music and to complete each other musically to form a perfect circle.

I don't want to limit myself musically. It would be really limiting if we'd neglect something we really want to do like explore other styles of music.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity and that being able to join in musical activity along with dancing could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.