"It's no more complicated than Spirit. It's interesting what happened after the war with music and arts… In Europe [during the war], arts and music were used to further ideals, that the artists and musicians didn't share. There were people forced to make state marches, forced to glorify ideals they didn't really hold true, and the power of bullying had its most epic day. Post that, the album saw everybody throwing all the rules out. In that period of experimentation, classical music went through a very interesting walk, and when it came back, it seized on a different kind of experimentation, all of western art became more generous, and the most generous music is the stuff that rewards the listener the most. And I haven't found the same heart in any record other than those last two Talk Talk albums. They need to be listened to loud and they need to be listened to over and over again. And I'm stunned every time. How they make me feel is because of the generosity of spirit, it's like weaving spiders' webs from scraps. So delicate, so precious, but not a note or tone is uneventful."

"Mad World’ is a great song and it has some personal significance for me. When I was on American Idol - you know how when you're on these competition shows, and you have these moments? - it was like my big moment. It was the one that people talked about for a while. “I remember the first time I heard the version by Gary Jules, which is in Donnie Darko. That was the version where I was like 'What?' Both versions of ‘Mad World’ are so brilliant and I think the thing about the song itself that's so brilliant is that it's talking about being disillusioned or disenfranchised as a youth, and with society, feeling like an outsider, and feeling like your voice doesn't matter. I would guess that the song is about dark times. “I think that now we're in a time where things like suicide and bullying and identity politics are so in the forefront of the conversation, but I think that when this was written, angst was more of a sort of mysterious thing and I think that's the brilliance of this song. It's talking about something that not everybody talked about at that point."