Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.

I have never seen opponents so silent about their record and so desperate to keep their power.

We asserted ourselves as a music community and showed legislators that music is positive. Especially if you've sold 300 million records worldwide and pay taxes.

The Wreckoning is a darker song. But the record is positive.

Don't give up be positive and if you know someone who knows someone at a record company don't stop beating down their door till you get heard. Don't ever say it'll never happen or it'll never happen.

The only thing I have no control over is the politics that goes on within the record company. It's always been the same but it's far tougher now because record companies are run by financial people before they were run by creative people.

I don't get involved in record label politics.

If a politician murders his mother the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry '