During the lifetime of Japan I became very neurotic, very paranoid.

And I know I'm paranoid and neurotic, I've made a career out of it.

I think nowadays it doesn't really matter where we are physically located. We create our own culture around us to a large extent, whether it's what we're listening to, what we're watching, what we're reading - it can have very little to do with one's immediate cultural environment. We are in a global culture in that respect.

I knew that I had to find my own voice, both figuratively and literally.

The public so often want to freeze the artist in a moment in time when they were at their peak, and they want the artist to revisit it over and over again as if it was something authentic.

It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.