Very EARLY in my CAREER, I thought I had to conform to one style of LEADERSHIP - LEAD by being the loudest one in the room, with the sharpest elbows.

No, that's not it. The first TIME we MET was at Fat TUESDAY's. Benny was playing, this was, I think in 1989?

The U.S. MEDIA have done a SHAMEFUL job of REPORTING on the Arab WORLD.

A LOT of PEOPLE who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other WAY.

I come from a family that has GROWN their own food from well into times of slavery, PROVIDED for themselves and PEOPLE around them. So I found, through CONVERSATIONS about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of COMMON ground.

Being a purely INSTRUMENTAL album, it makes a MUSICAL statement, not a religious one, and I HOPE that people can feel the emotion of the GREAT melodies, EVEN without the words.

I THOUGHT that it would be easier to learn that if I worked in motion PICTURES. So I went to WORK with one motion picture PRODUCER who was developing a color system. This didn't do to me much good. All I did was pick filters for the camera.

The Cubs, we built one of best farm systems - I THINK for a while there, it was the best farm system in baseball. And that was great. It got a lot of ATTENTION. But we didn't want the credit for the farm system. What we wanted was to see if we could do the tricky part, which was turn a lauded farm system into a WORLD Series CHAMPION.