"Raspberry Beret', 'Paisley Park' and the title track was amazing as well. It's a great psychedelic cover, I guess a bit like Sgt. Pepper's…. I love the flute intro on the title track and that was a big goal for the musical - to have each song have this little virtuosic moment, whether it was a harmonised guitar solo or a little flute line or some kind of piano solo. We had a rule that you had to be able to air-play some instrument on any song and if you could do that you could still be excited listening to the album 20 years down the line. It's hard doing fully contemporary music like Yeasayer, where doing something like a guitar solo always seems like a little dated or cheesy - so you want to have that variety, like a saxophone that's going through a weird pedal or being chopped up by a sampler or something, but this was pure "let's get this trumpet solo to be really haunting"."

"One of the nice things about being on EMI at the beginning of the 80s was they basically let you come in and get as many records as you liked. So I got an awful lot of classical records and worked my way through them. There's only so many things on the contemporary catalogue that were that interesting. You could get a Wire record. You could get this and that, but a lot of that stuff wasn't that interesting. Obviously, being a requiem, this is music for the dead. It's late 19th century, incredibly dynamic. I guess you'd say post-Beethoven, but more romantic, quite emotional. It goes from very, very simple, quiet, plain solo voice and it builds into this huge thing. It draws you in and completely absorbs you. It's like sailing on the sea. There are quiet bits where everything's still and then some storm comes and everything breaks into a furious tempest. It's something that I've been listening to for 30 years. It's something that I'll often play when I'm going to bed, weirdly."

"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."