I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

That's been a strength in some ways, but it's also an understanding of the dynamics of music and the different beats and melodies that wouldn't be common to a non-Armenian.

My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really crazy naive solution for the end of civilization.

People get so attached to a position which they identify themselves with that they just spurt it out, but they can't really give you a viable reason why they feel that way.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.