I think anytime that you go to the extreme of any mode of economics, be it capitalism or communism, you have these feedback mechanisms that make the system turn in on itself.

I like having songs that go from the personal to the kind of inter-relational, universal, because everything comes back to micro/macro and everything’s tied in.

With most of the songs and music that I’ve composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves,...

Day is just a collection of hours.

If you allow for a purely capitalistic society, without any type of regulation at all, you will get one monopoly that will eat all of the smaller fish and own everything, and then you’ll have...

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

I think it’s my interaction with journalists that has pegged me more as political than my actual records, although they have obviously political aspects to them as well.

Harout Pamboukjian is one of the biggest Armenian folk singers in the world. In the ’70s, he was making these records that were really Zeppelin-influenced.

I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase ‘Elect The Dead’ than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about...

I write music when I’m free and for no particular project in mind.

I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.

It’s probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

I’ve worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don’t like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

We first fought… in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.

I’m a huge Beatles fan, but I’ve only really gotten into them as an adult.

I think music is a powerful medium because it co-inspires. It inspires the artist who then inspires the listener, and it’s a back-and-forth process.

It’s the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.

When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA,...

Sometimes a good love song can change the world and create positive energy more than any political song can.

In America, there’s more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that’s not even an issue. I think people just assume that music...

The most important thing about music that I’ve learned after all this time is that to me, it’s a way of reaching the truth.

People always ask me ‘do you think there should be more bands doing political music?’ and I say ‘absolutely not.’

We’re addicted to this concept of civilization – we can’t imagine living outside of it because we’ve had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been...

Sometimes it’s better to have a benign dictator than a dumb democracy, to be honest.

Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in...

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

Touring and putting out records is fun and cool, but I’ve been doing it for a long time.

You listen to Bob Dylan and you can’t help but think of the 60s, it’s very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the...

You can say a lot more with a poem than you can with a song, but with a song you can really be more powerful with it. You can express it a lot more powerfully.

As long as people are living their truth or their vision, whether they’re activists or not, that’s the important thing.

I’m not comfortable with just entertaining. Although I like entertaining, I also like bringing forward the truth of our times as minstrels used to in the old days.

People get so attached to a position which they identify themselves with that they just spurt it out, but they can’t really give you a viable reason why they feel that way.

I like African music, and I’m a huge Ravi Shankar fan.

Pretending that we live doesn’t make us alive.

I’d rather let the music speak for itself.

Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.

My two interests are spirituality and politics. I would mesh them in some way; maybe try to figure out the politics of spirituality, or the spirituality of politics. Or maybe come up with this really...

I’ve always worked on all different types of music, some with specific project goals and deadlines and some not. Sometimes I would write a piece of music that is almost like a film score or...

I’ve always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You...

As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.

Capitalism unchecked is not a democratic system.

‘Elect the Dead’ is a rock record that takes you on a journey with different types of genres integrated, different lyrical themes digested, and many fun and colorful moments to enjoy.

I think that the memory of Armenia’s genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

I think I might write a book. I like writing. People have asked me if I would get into politics, but I think I feel a lot more effective being a representative of truth through...

I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we’re here. And we’re trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.

Corporatization is the descendant of industrialization.

I’ve got my own studio, and I’ve got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I’ve got stuff that’s electronic, orchestral, jazz, I’ve got rock, I’ve got metal, you know, I don’t have polka.