There is an expectation that an artist’s autobiography will function as a primer, providing “explanations” of the art. But this book is not a listening guide. If anything, it is an extended defiance of that expectation. If it’s meant to teach you anything about my music, it starts with the lesson that you need to relinquish that desire for transparency. Music is about listening. Nothing I can say can mean anything once you start to listen. It’s about the sound, not about the words I might be able to pin up to preface or accompany whatever the sound does to you when it goes in your ears.
If you really need to know, I can tell you—for whatever it’s worth—that anything can go into my music. I get ideas from all sorts of sources. It might be going to the theater or looking at a painting or just watching a tree branch outside the window. It might be reading about the muddy intricacies of trench warfare during World War I or poring over The Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi’s seventeenth-century book on sword-fighting tactics) or looking at the novels of James Joyce or Heinrich Böll. Anything can seep into the music.
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