Leon Redbone

My views on music, and life in general, are completely out of step with everything that's going on. I've always been out of step. The only thing that interests me is history, reviewing the past and making something out of it.

I think there's a preoccupation with the American market to make excuses and justify its past. If it isn't current, it means somebody has to make an excuse for it. If it's 'cult,' it gives it a sense of illegitimate legitimacy.

I'm not interested in stirring anybody up through music. If you're going to stir people up, it has to be a thought process that has nothing to do with music. I see music as having to do with an internal thing. Something that stirs you up is external.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.