"I've made a really valuable association with a gent from Los Angeles, Mr Ben Merlis. I quite admire Ben as a performer – he's a bass player in a pretty lively band, they travel out of LA frequently. And like much of the stuff we're talking about, you have to dig deep to find something of value. I found this through Ben. There's an ambience here, the unsettling presence of impending doom, which is part of the environment that we step into day by day in this contemporary world. It's part of what we have to exist with. 

I was talking with Terry Manning and Joe Hardy from our recording studios in Memphis and we got onto this topic of ambience. There was once a constant struggle to overcome background noise, the hiss of tape passing across the recording head. However, when absolute digital silence came into play, it was very unsettling. It's not in our genetic code. You can enter an anechoic chamber, which eliminates all sound, and very quickly it's so disturbing that you want out."

"I went to see this on opening night at a Los Angeles cinema, having no idea what the heck it was about or what to expect. The room was sold out and I had to sit (with Gary Kemp) in the front row. Holy shit! After several scenes with Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, I turned to Gary and said, “He’s going to be on the cover of People magazine next week.” One could feel the audience adjusting to what they were watching, as the stakes were being raised, scene by scene. It was perhaps the most visceral cinema-going experience I have ever had. And it wasn’t just opening-night thrills. It’s a beautifully made drama, with the most fabulous production design (by Kristi Zea), that happens to double as a horror film. Like with all of my favorite films, I am happy to watch it once a year. The Silence of the Lambs raised the bar for contemporary popular filmmaking. Somewhat like Pulp Fiction or Jaws, it changed everything."