The best compliment I ever had is, one day I was in Nashville, some disc jockey said, Hey, that sounds like a Tom T. Hall song. Up until then there hadn't been any such thing.
I rode all around Hollywood listening to Donna Summer, looking out the window - all by myself - just going, 'I'm number one!' It's a pretty extraordinary feeling.
I wake up, and I'll just start reading and trying to brace myself for the rest of the day, and all the while I'm doing that, I'm kicking myself mentally.
We've got 400,000 girls with beach-y blonde hair, the same nose, gigantic lips, implants in their cheeks, and little Chicklets for teeth. Are they really prettier?
I'm super serious about that stuff. I mean, it's rare that I sit down at a drum set when I'm not touring, because we tour so much.
Every musician writes about past relationships. And other than that, I can promise you, I have very little in common with Taylor Swift.
I try to visit people in hospitals when I can, smiling and joking while I'm there. But when I leave, I just start crying.
As Andy says, being in this band in the early 1980s made you feel like you were part of a pizza. We were always one of the band, one of Duran Duran, or one of the Taylors.
His name, even, is part of the marketing scheme, I mean, Thelonious Sphere Monk - how can you think of a better name to fit his style of playing?
People come from a certain generation and a certain whole way of looking at things, and you really do become a prisoner of your own world.
When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.
The Google Voice service is a lifesaver for me. My actual phone number changes a lot, so having a canonical Google Voice number that doesn't change - it's actually my same number from high school - is indispensable.
The idea that God's mercy is connected to whether or not I shave is ludicrous, and I need to just trust myself, and that, you know, if I'm deserving of God's mercy, I'll get it, regardless of, you know, my beard.
I came from a folk-family background. Although we weren't really the all-singing, all-dancing-around-the-piano folkies or anything like that, there is that idea of singing and playing with your parents and your family and your cousins.
I say from my experience that, you know, I have to do my career, and, you know with us, our careers come first, and, you know, anybody we're with has to take a back seat to that and understand that these are our lives.
I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.
For me, in songwriting, I have a route I can take. Maybe there's some forks, I can go this way, this way. But I know those roads. I still have the experience behind me.
Over the course of a day, you get to get a feel for where you're playing, so when you get out on stage, you already feel like you've had a bit of a bonding experience with them.
If anyone asks me about the George Martin years I usually say I group all of that stuff together as the single greatest experience but I wasn't scared I was just really looking forward to it.
Nothing's more exciting than a day in a studio with a string section - or more ruinously expensive. So it's good to feed that habit away from the band, especially if it means more experience for the next Radiohead string day.
Not only did I get to play with these great international musicians, but I also had the opportunity to jam with the local celebrities in Toronto, people like the Walsh Brothers, David Wilcox, Kim Mitchell and the like. It was a great learning experie...
